Towns of Aethorra

City · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 18,000 people

Come up the Hethlend road in Serleck and you meet Chomtholk's sheep before its walls. The flocks come down off the Chomkel hills for shearing, dense white Chomkel fleeces by the thousand, and they fill the road for a day's walk out. Then the city shows on its rise: a gray wall, a jumble of tile roofs, malthouse chimneys, and over the fields the rooks that follow every plow in Chomkel. Arrive at first light and you hear Chomtholk before you see it. The Gray Choir is singing in the streets, hundreds of voices in gray wool, and the sound carries over the fields.

At a glance. Chomtholk is the chief city of Chomkel, the wool country of the northwest. An earl of the crown rules it from a hall inside the north wall, with the town's elected reeve beside him. A stone wall rings the old town. The city lives on Chomkel wool, which is the kingdom's second export after grain, and on Chomkel barley, which makes Aldmere's ale. It sits on the crown road from Hethlend to the Vargate, and the Fur-Road Qaflan use that road twice a year. It keeps the Hearthfaith, but in 1146 it is best known as the stronghold of the Gray Choir, whose followers across the northern shires may number 25,000, thousands of them in the city itself. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. Chomtholk stands on a long rise above a ford, and the townsfolk say the end of its name is the Aldmeri tholk, "ford." The old town climbs inside the wall from the ford to the earl's hall. The Wool Staple fills the lower town by the river: long timber halls where fleeces are weighed, graded and baled for the road south to Hethlend's Wool Gate, and where the crown's clerks take the wool-crown on every sack bound out of the kingdom. East of it the Maltings smoke day and night, drying Chomkel barley for the brewhouses of three shires. The north gate is the Red-Axe Gate, named for Hearthking Fevar Red-Axe, who raided down the Fur Trail as far as Chomtholk in 283. Because of him Aldmere built its first fortress at the Vargate. Outside the east wall lies the Gray Field, crown land given to the Choir's families to farm. They have left it unsown three winters running. They meet there to sing, and they call it the Wadun, the Aldmeri word for "choir."

Life and trade. Chomtholk shears in Serleck, the wool month, and holds its Fleece Fair in the Staple the whole month through. A good Chomkel fleece fetches three quarters of a mark. Bread here is wheat mixed with barley and costs an eighth of a mark a loaf, the same as Crown wheat in Hethlend, and that angers everyone. The Hrodvald say Fevar came home with nothing but bread because his men had eaten the gold. So every caravan leaving north through the Red-Axe Gate is handed a small loaf "for Fevar," and the Qaflan eat it on the road. The city also claims the Sleeping Reeve. Its burgher-reeves say the man who slept through the Moot's founding vote in 352 was one of theirs, and they do not knock on the floor of their own hall. On Quiet Hearth night, the 6th of Tulront, the city sits in the dark for an hour. The Choir sits in the dark all night.

The Choir is what Chomtholk quarrels over. Its singers teach that the Quiet Hearth is going out and the Lake Comet will come early. They give away what they own, and they will not sow winter wheat. The unsown Chomkel fields are one reason Hethlend's loaf has doubled since 1143. The wool merchants call the Choir mad. The poor call it kind. The earl thinks about the harvest.

People. Olarth the Choirmaster (olarth, "prayer") is a fuller of about sixty who gave his mill to his journeymen and now leads the singing on the Gray Field at dawn. The Choir has no titles, so he has none, but the city treats him as its voice.

Hooks. - The Choir's families have begun giving away their plows, and the grain factors are buying them cheap and carting them south. - Sister Tunith is expected from Hethlend, sent by the king to reason with the Choir. Olarth has had a room made ready for her on the Gray Field. - A Fur-Road caravan came south with a Hrodvald hrind who sings the Fevar tale with another ending. In his, the bread was poisoned. - The earl has written to the Chancellor that if the Choir triples, Chomkel will not feed itself in 1148.

Chomtholk is CONTESTED. Its wool and ale sell as well as ever, but thousands of its people have decided the world is ending, and they are gentle, generous and immovable about it. If the Choir walks out, the city loses those hands. If the crown forces the Choir to sow, it breaks the Charter of Hearths. Either way, Chomtholk is where Aldmere will learn which it holds dearer.

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City · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 15,000 people

From the Lark Gate of Hethlend the crown road runs north some two hundred miles through wheat and hedgerow, and Lultolor shows at the end of it only when you are nearly upon it. The city lies in a broad hollow of the northern plain. From the road you see first its hilltop beacon, then the tops of its towers, and only at the last rise the whole walled town filling the bowl. In autumn the Farvig geese pass over in long calling lines, and the older townsfolk still stop in the street to watch them go.

At a glance. Lultolor is the seat of the northern shire that bears its name, and after the capital one of Aldmere's four great cities. An earl of the crown holds it with an elected reeve. Its stone wall was raised higher after the raids. It lives on grain and wool from the northern shires, on its markets, and on the meeting of two crown roads: its own road to Hethlend, and the road from Chomtholk to Thalmirn and the Northmere. It keeps the Hearthfaith, with a few Sun-Turners from the Northmere and a Gray Choir that grows every year. It is known for its beacon, and for living through a generation of Hrodvald raids after the Great Winter of 1089. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The townsfolk say the name comes from tolor, the Aldmeri word for "hollow," and they call the old center the Tolor: a tight knot of lanes around the market cross at the bottom of the bowl. The Grain Hall, a great barn of a building on the market square, is where the northern shires' wheat is sold and where Caelvenne's factors buy against the Compact. The town wall is the Goose Wall. It was raised in the years when the raiders came south with the Farvig geese, and the town kept watch whenever the geese flew. On the hill above the north wall stands Beacon Hill, where a fire is kept ready to pass word south along the signal fires to the Statil in Hethlend, and east toward the Northmere.

Life and trade. This is mixed farming country, and the market sells wheat, barley, cattle, cheese and wool from every village a week's walk around. In the spring of 1146 a bushel of Crown wheat sold in the Grain Hall for two and a quarter marks, a little under Hethlend's price, and every grower in the shire knows how much less the Compact pays. A bed and supper at an inn on the square costs a mark. The town sends its burgher-reeves to the Moot on the 1st of Halshul, and they ride south as one of the loudest companies of the Clearance, the young reeves and shire-knights who want the debt to Caelvenne paid off whatever it costs.

In Halshul and Wrunim, when the Farvig geese fly south, the town keeps the Goose Watch. The first night the geese are heard, the young men climb the Goose Wall with bows and horns and stay till dawn. No raider has come in nearly twenty years, and the watch has turned into a night of drinking on the walls. The older women still bank the hearths and keep the children in.

People. None of the realm's great names lives here. The earl, like many of his neighbors, is one of the northern lords who have married daughters of the Vargate Clans and Clan Nugag.

Hooks. - The beacon on Beacon Hill was lit by mistake this spring, and the Crown Wardens in the Statil had half their men armed before the next fire said it was nothing. Someone paid the boy who lit it. - A Caelvennois factor in the Grain Hall has been buying next year's harvest now, at this year's price, from growers who need coin. - Kruman Ironjaw's young men still slip down the Fur Trail in autumn, and twice this year the Goose Watch has found a stranger's tracks in the stubble. - The Clearance reeves mean to propose in the Moot that the royal forests of Nolsomel be sold. Nolsomel's reeves have heard.

Lultolor is STABLE. The raids are over, the northern shires have filled again, and grain and wool keep the Grain Hall busy. Its danger lies in the Moot. The Clearance is strongest in towns like this one, where growers feel the Compact price in every sale. Lultolor will back the prince long before it backs the Chancellor.

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City · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 14,000 people

The road south from Hethlend runs for days through wheat, and then, on the last morning, into beech woods, gray-trunked and silent, the light coming green through the leaves. Then the trees open on the valley of the Nollen, slow and brown between reed banks. On its north bank stands Nolsomel: a walled town grown into a city, with timber yards along the water, small barges at the quays, and charcoal smoke rising from the woods behind.

At a glance. Nolsomel is the city of the River Nollen and the southwestern woods, the seat of its province and a crossroads of the kingdom's southern roads. An earl of the crown rules it with an elected reeve, and the crown's forester keeps the royal woods around it. It has a stone wall and a river gate. It lives on timber, game, charcoal and river trade, and on two crown roads: the Gap Road, from Hethlend through Nolsomel and Wrunvos to Tharxa and on to Castavar, and the west road through Kemvos to Durtisir. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known for the Nollen deer, the royal game that a man hangs for poaching, and for the Nollen pike. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The city is long and follows the river. The Pike Quays along the north bank take the small barges that work the Nollen down to the lake. The Drift ties up there too, and in late summer, when the river runs low, the barges wait for rain. Upstream of the quays the Beechyard is a quarter of sawpits, timber stacks and charcoal sheds, where Nollen beech is cut into planks, barrel staves and fuel for Hethlend's forges. The Downs Market by the south gate is where the Gap Road comes in: wool from the Southdowns, and in quiet years salt, wine, oil and silver coming up from Castavar. Outside the west gate stand the Deer Gallows. They are seldom used. They are kept freshly tarred.

Life and trade. Nolsomel eats well. River pike is common food, and a big one sells for a quarter mark. Venison is common talk, because nobody but a lord's household may eat it and everyone knows someone who has. A cart of beech charcoal costs half a mark at the Beechyard. The townsfolk warn every newcomer about the nightcap, the white mushroom of the beech woods that looks like the good kind and is not, and about the Nollen adder, which seldom kills a grown man. Twice a year the crown's judges ride in from Hethlend and sit a week, and every hanging case in the province waits for them, poaching cases first of all.

In 1146 the city quarrels over the woods. The royal forests around Nolsomel belong to the crown, and the Clearance would sell them to pay the debt. The timber merchants would like to buy. The foresters, the charcoal-burners and most of the town live off the woods as they stand, and would not like to see them bought.

People. Homost the Forester (homost, "oak") keeps the king's woods around Nolsomel. He is a heavy, soft-spoken man who has walked the same beech rides for thirty years, and he is the reason the Deer Gallows are tarred. The poor of the Beechyard say he has brought two poachers before the crown's judges and let twenty go.

Hooks. - A Nollen deer was found dead inside the city wall with an arrow of Downs yew in it, and every longbowman on the Gap Road is under suspicion. - Factors from Lultolor have been riding the royal forests with a surveyor's chain. Homost has asked them twice what they are measuring. - A Puesdro trader in the Downs Market is paying in jabirga that the changers will not take at the old rate. - A Drift barge stranded at low water was found carrying a Bound family north from the Stair.

Nolsomel is STABLE. Its woods, its river and its roads have kept it busy for centuries. What could change it comes from outside: the Clearance's plan to sell the forests, and a Fourth Crusade that would shut the Gap Road and empty the Downs Market.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 7,000 people

Thalmirn stands where the land runs out into reeds. Coming down the east road you see a low town on the north shore of Lake Surmave, a stone wall newer than the houses behind it, and, running east and west along the shore, long straight earthen dikes with windmills turning on them. Behind the dikes, where there was marsh ten years ago, lie drained fields of black soil. Past them the reed beds of the Northmere marshes still run to the edge of the sky, with smoke rising from the stilt-houses of the Marsh Reeds.

At a glance. Thalmirn is the chief town of the Northmere, where the east road from Hethlend meets the road from Chomtholk and Lultolor. A lakeshore earl of the crown holds it. It lives on the lake, on the traffic of the east road, on smoked mere eel and mere reed from the marshes, and more each year on the grain of its new drained fields. It keeps the Hearthfaith, with a Sun-Turner lamp-house for the northern converts to the Radiant Iévaine. It is known for the Hrodvald raid of 1127 and for the dikes. Direction: RISING.

The town. The old town lies inside the wall. Its eastern edge is still called the Burnt Row, rebuilt in stone after the raid of 1127, the last great raid after the Great Winter. There Duke Minthor Durift took the long scar across his face from a Hrodvald axe, and Stelest Kruman Ironjaw lost an eye to a spear. The raid drove the crown at last to fortify Lulstat and the Northmere, and Thalmirn's wall dates from those years. South of the wall the Lake Stair runs down to a stone quay where lake boats load grain and eels for Larvir. East and west run the Drained Fields, cut out of the marsh by the dikes. At their edge is the Marsh Market, where the Marsh Reeds bring reed, eels and duck and buy salt and iron.

Life and trade. A smoked mere eel costs an eighth of a mark in Thalmirn, half its price in Hethlend. Lake boats cross from here to Larvir in two or three days. The drained land is the richest soil in the Northmere, and its new tenants grow wheat and barley where the reed-cutters' fathers set eel traps. On Quiet Hearth night the town names the dead of 1127 aloud before its own. The Hrodvald sing their own saga of the Battle of Thalmirn, and a Hrodvald trader who sings it in a Thalmirn tavern is asked to leave.

The dikes are what the town quarrels over. They make Thalmirn richer every year, and they are draining away the Northmere marshes and the Marsh Reeds with them. The Reeds are some two thousand people who live on stilts, speak old Vareth, and keep the Hearthfaith with one hearth more, for the marsh itself. Aldmere claims them and has never collected a tax from them. Nobody has asked them about the dikes.

People. Wromern the Dike-Builder (wromern, "bend of a river") is a Hethlend-trained surveyor of about forty who has built every dike on the shore and plans the next three. He is proud of the work. He has never gone into the marshes past the Marsh Market.

Hooks. - The earl's new dike will cut the channel the Marsh Reeds use to reach the lake. The Reeds have sent a man to Hethlend to see the king, who takes a week over everything. - Durift's people and Ironjaw's both claim a shield found in a Drained Field last spring. - The Sun-Turners' lamp went out in the spring storms, for the first time anyone can remember, and the lamp-keeper will not say how. - Cherüsh horse-traders have been seen at the Marsh Market selling steppe horses for two crowns each, twice what one fetches on the Grass Sea.

Thalmirn is RISING. It has recovered from 1127, its wall is sound, its fields are growing, and its lake trade faces Larvir, which Caelvenne cannot do without. It is rising at the Marsh Reeds' cost. In ten years there may be no marsh left to quarrel over.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 4,000 people

Six days out from Hethlend's March Gate by cart, the west road leaves the hop poles of the Wenvorm behind and passes into orchard country. Codtholk comes up among apple trees: a small walled town at a stream ford, a crown toll-house at its east gate, and outside the walls a sprawl of wagon yards, stables and cider presses where the carts bound for the Westmarch stop for the night.

At a glance. Codtholk is a market town of the Crownlands. The crown holds it directly through its toll-house, and an elected reeve runs it day to day. It is the first stop on the west road from Hethlend to Durtisir and Venei's Throat, about 125 miles from the capital. It has a wall, stone roads kept by the crown, and a watch of guildsmen, and it lives on cider and on the caravans heading west. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known for western cider, and as the last place to buy what a traveler will need in the Westmarch. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The townsfolk say the name means "bracken ford," after the ford over its stream. Inside the wall the houses are timber-frame and tiled; outside, thatched. The Toll House at the east gate takes the crown road toll: an eighth of a mark for a laden pack-beast, half a mark for a laden cart, a quarter for each head of cattle. Outside the west gate the Wagon Yards hold the caravans, wheelwrights and farriers of the Westmarch trade. Cider Row along the stream is lined with presses and cellars. The Road Hearth, the town's hearth-house of the Road, stands by the ford, and carters touch its door before the climb west.

Life and trade. Codtholk is Aldmere's cider country, and the Hearth apple grows in every hedgerow. A jug of cider costs an eighth of a mark, a barrel of good pressing a crown. The presses run through Halshul and Wrunim, and the whole town smells of apples. Travelers bound for the Westmarch buy boots, rope, salt and a spare horseshoe here, because the Duke's country is dearer. Many stop at the Toll House to have their loads counted and sealed, so they have a crown clerk's word to show if Duke Durift's toll-men at the pass try to charge them for more than they carry.

People. Nobody of note lives here, but everyone of note passes through: Duke Durift riding east to the Moot on the 1st of Halshul and back west the day it rises, Dunmorrow steel factors heading east with their wagons, and Qaflan captains with grievances.

Hooks. - A young royal auditor has taken rooms at the Toll House and is copying its sealed tallies for the last three years. - A Qaflan captain who lost a driver on the Throat road is hiring guards in the Wagon Yards and not saying what for. - The cider guild will not sell to Durtisir until the Duke's steward pays last year's account. - A Dunmorrow wagon under guard stopped at Cider Row, and its drivers paid for their cider in gold.

Codtholk is STABLE. The west road will always need a last stop, and the orchards do not care who wins in the Moot. But if the crown and the Westmarch ever come to blows, Codtholk is where the crown would muster, and its reeves know it.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 3,500 people

The Caelvenne road leaves Hethlend by the Mirror Gate and runs southeast through river meadows where red-brown Wenvorm oxen graze knee-deep in grass. About a week out by cart comes Haldarthir: a compact walled town on a low rise above a creek, a line of coaching inns along the road, and in the creek below, the stone footings of an old mill.

At a glance. Haldarthir is a town on the crown road from Hethlend to Wromthalm, the road that runs on to Claupiose and Solvaine. The crown's toll-men keep its toll-house, and an elected reeve runs its market. It has a small stone wall. It lives on the road and the meadows: fattening oxen, horse-hire, inns, and the road trade in goods too fragile or too urgent to go by water. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known as the place where Caelvennois leusores first begin to pass as freely as marks. Direction: RISING.

The town. The townsfolk say the name means "mill haven," and they point to the Old Mill footings in the creek, where barges once came up from the Nollen to load flour. The Coaching Row of inns and stables lines the crown road inside the gate, and every inn keeps fresh horses for riders on the Caelvenne road. The Meadow Market outside the south gate sells cattle on Road-day, Totid. The Leusore Table by the Road Hearth is a changer's stone bench where Caelvennois gold is weighed and changed, most often at about twenty marks to the coin.

Life and trade. The crown road carries what must not get wet or is in a hurry: letters, silk, mirrors, glass, and Caelvennois factors riding north to buy grain. A bed and supper on the Coaching Row costs a mark, and stabling a horse for the night a quarter. Fattened Wenvorm oxen leave for Hethlend's yards at about five crowns a head. The inns hear the news from Solvaine before the capital does, and players of the Lantern Road perform in the inn yards for coins in the hat.

People. None of the realm's great names lives here. A company of Southdowns longbowmen is expected on the road, bound for Larvir under the Grain Compact, and Coaching Row has already raised its prices.

Hooks. - Dunt Wrunvos's longbowmen will lodge here a night. He is said to have promised to drink Coaching Row dry. - A Caelvennois courier died in his bed at an inn, and his dispatch case was empty by the time the reeve arrived. - The changer at the Leusore Table has begun refusing Castavari coin altogether. - Someone has been buying up the meadow leases along the creek in the name of a Solvaine banking house.

Haldarthir is RISING. The Caelvenne road carries more every year, and the town lives on every cart that passes. It leans on Caelvenne more than Hethlend likes. If the Compact were ever torn up, as the prince and the Clearance want, Haldarthir would be the first town in Aldmere to feel it.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 4,000 people

The east road leaves Hethlend by the Lake Gate and runs many days along the north bank of the Wenvorm. Brilkemed is the first town on it, on a round green hill where the land lifts before the river reaches the lake. From the hilltop on a clear day you can see the Wenvorm widen toward its mouth, barges in lines on the water, and past them the gray of Lake Surmave with no far shore.

At a glance. Brilkemed is a hill town in the province of Lultolor, held for the crown by a baron from a stone tower on the crest. A wall rings the hilltop, and an open lower town runs along the road. It lives on the traffic of the east road to the Northmere and on to the Grass Sea and Kaishon, and on the river trade below. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known for its view of the Golden Road, and for the week each spring when the Drift's Helms meet at the Wenvorm mouth. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The name ends in kemed, "hill," and the town is built on one. The Baron's Tower holds the crest, with the hearth-house and the market square just under it. The East Road Inns line the road at the foot of the hill, where caravans bound for Thalmirn, Lulstat and Tolmar-Buyor water their beasts. The Mouth Stair is a long flight of steps and a cart track down to the reed shore and the Drift's ferry landing. From the Watch Stone on the hilltop the barons' men once counted barges for the crown. The townsfolk still count them, for wagers.

Life and trade. Brilkemed sells to travelers and buys from the river. The Drift ferries carts across the Wenvorm below the town for an eighth of a mark, cheaper than any crown ferry and never taxed. Bargemen come up the Mouth Stair for ale and news. At New Year the Drift's Helms meet for the Helms' Moot at the Wenvorm mouth, and Brilkemed's inns fill with bargemen as Wromthalm's do across the water. The same day the town's reeve cuts the First Furrow in the baron's field.

A caravan that travels the whole of Aldmere's East Road to Kokrin faces about two months on the road, and the Cherüsh passage gift at Tolmar-Buyor. Brilkemed's innkeepers price their news of the steppe as carefully as their beds.

People. None of the realm's great names lives here. Pell of the Drift, Helm Rindlith's runner, is often seen on the Mouth Stair in spring.

Hooks. - Threeoars has lain moored below the hill for a month, which it never does, and the baron's men have been told not to count it. - A Tsanha Qaflan caravan heading west sold its steppe felt at half price in Brilkemed and went back east empty. - A rider under a white felt banner asked the way to Hethlend at an East Road inn and paid in Kaishoni silver. - Pell has been asking the old men which barges the Watch Stone counters used to miss.

Brilkemed is STABLE. The east road and the river keep it fed. If the Cherüsh close the Tsanha Crossing its caravans will thin, and if the Golden Road is ever blocked, it will be among the first towns to see it.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 3,000 people

West of Nolsomel the road climbs out of the beech woods into rough pasture, and the Karzhan Spine stands up across the whole western sky. Kemvos lies on a shoulder of the foothills, a small walled town of stone and thatch with goat-pens along its lanes. On market days its streets fill with goatherds from the mountain, who speak a Tharaxi tongue salted with Aldmeri.

At a glance. Kemvos is a town of Nolsomel province on the road west from Nolsomel to Durtisir, held under a baron of the province with an elected reeve. It has a low stone wall. It is the nearest Aldmere market to the Stair, though that pass is still more than a week's travel off. It lives on goats, hides, cheese, on supplying the Westmarch garrison, and on guiding. It keeps the Hearthfaith, and in Stair Row the Stairfolk's Watcher is honored quietly. It is known as the town the Stairfolk leave the mountain for. Direction: RISING.

The town. The Goat Market at the top of the slope is the town square, the hearth-house on one side and the baron's hall on the other. Stair Row runs down the west side of town, a street of Stairfolk families whose young came down off the mountain and did not go back. The Garrison Yard by the west gate stores flour, arrows and salt for the Westmarch men who hold the Stair under the Bridge Treaty of 1052, and its carts leave on Road-day. The Guide's Rest is an inn at the foot of Stair Row. A traveler who wants to cross the Spine by a path that is not a pass can find someone there to take him.

Life and trade. Kemvos trades mountain for lowland. Goats, hides, cheese and ibex-lichen for the dyers go east; salt, needles, cloth and news go up the mountain. A goat sells for three marks at the Goat Market. A Stairfolk guide asks two marks a day and in the end takes whatever the traveler has. The Stairfolk know every path over the Spine that is not a pass, and have sold what they know to smugglers, Tyrthas hunters and Bound runaways alike. Kemvos is where many runaways first see an Aldmere town. Under the Charter of Hearths a Bound man from Tharax is free the moment he touches Aldmere soil, and in Kemvos he most often has a Tyrthas hunter a few days behind him. The town is proud of the Charter and nervous of the hunters.

People. None of the realm's great names lives here. Zodakt the Innkeeper of Denekt, on the far side of the Stair, has a Stairfolk wife whose cousins keep a house in Stair Row.

Hooks. - A Bound family came down Stair Row last week, and a Tharaxi stranger has been asking for them by name at the Guide's Rest. - The Stairfolk say the Watcher turned its head early this year, before the first snow. - The Garrison Yard has doubled its orders of lamp oil and firewood since spring. Duke Durift's men say it is the cold. - A Stairfolk girl in Stair Row is teaching Kemvos children the mountain paths for an eighth of a mark a walk, and the baron has told her to stop.

Kemvos is RISING, because the Stairfolk are fading. Every family that leaves the mountain comes here first, and the town grows by the same measure the Stair empties. If Tharax ever comes over the Stair for its runaways, Kemvos is the first town it will reach.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 3,500 people

The Gap Road runs south from Nolsomel over open downs, where buzzards ride the wind and Downs hares bolt from the verges. Wrunvos comes up on a long ridge: a walled market town with a toll-house on its south road, archery butts outside every gate, and dark Downs yews in every hearth-yard. It is the last Aldmere town on the road to Tharax. Past it the road runs on some three hundred miles and more toward Tharxa, and the country empties.

At a glance. Wrunvos is a Southdowns town on the crown road from Hethlend and Nolsomel to Tharxa, ruled by its reeve under a Southdowns lord, with a stone wall and a crown toll-house. It lives on sheep and wool, on the Gap Road trade, and on its archery guild. It keeps the Hearthfaith, and its lords and people are Crownmen almost to a man. It is known for its longbowmen, and for sharing its name with Sergeant Dunt Wrunvos. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The South Toll House takes Aldmere's crown tolls on everything that comes up the Gap Road: Castavari salt, wine, oil and silver in quiet years, Tharaxi iron and Gap falcons, and the mule trains of the Gap Wardens and the Qaflan. The Tharax Yard beside it is a walled inn-yard where foreign drivers stable their mules, a small answer to Tharxa's Strangers' Yard. The Wool Cross in the market square is where Southdowns fleeces are sold. The Hare Stone outside the north gate is a boulder carved with a hare, where the archery guild tattoos its members.

Life and trade. Every Wrunvos child is given a child's bow on Bow-day, the first day of spring, and shoots at a straw hare. A child who hits it earns the guild's hare tattoo at sixteen. In the last hundred years most girls have taken up the bow as well. On Wemm's Night, the first full moon of Larrel, the young archers shoot at the moon from the butts, as every Southdowns village does. A seasoned Downs yew stave sells here for three marks, a finished longbow in Hethlend for ten. A Tharaxi iron bar is worth two marks inside Tharax, but the South Toll House takes it only as scrap.

The town quarrels over the road. When the Gap is quiet the Tharax Yard is full and the town does well. When Castavar marches on crusade, as it did through the Gap under safe-conduct in 1139, the road empties.

People. Sergeant Dunt Wrunvos shares the town's name, and the town claims him, though his own village lies out on the downs. He wears the hare tattoo on his inner wrist, speaks the broadest Southdowns burr in the army, and is cheerfully rude to lords.

Hooks. - Dunt Wrunvos's company has been ordered to Larvir under the Grain Compact, and the town sent them off with a barrel and a list of complaints. - A Tharaxi mule train in the Tharax Yard carried a Castavari rider who asked about the road north and the walls of Nolsomel. - The toll-house clerk has found clipped jabirga in the tolls of three separate caravans. - A Phymon youth from the Anvil was found asleep in the Tharax Yard with no bar in his pocket, no Tharaxi companions, and no tale he would tell.

Wrunvos is STABLE, a town of sheep and bows that rises and falls with the Gap Road. If the Fourth Crusade comes, the road will close, and Wrunvos will be the first town in Aldmere to feel it.

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Town · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 2,000 people

Ownvos lies off the crown roads in the heart of the downs, in a fold of land with no view of anything but grass and sky. You find it by following sheep-tracks, or by the sound of bows: from a mile out, on any dry afternoon, you hear arrows thump into the straw at the town butts. Then the town shows, gray stone and tile, with dark yews taller than its houses standing in every hearth-yard.

At a glance. Ownvos is a small Southdowns town ruled by its reeve under a Southdowns lord. It has no wall worth the name. It lives on sheep and, above all, on the Downs yew. Its bowyers cut, season and shape the staves that become the longbows of the Southdowns and the Crown Wardens. It keeps the Hearthfaith and holds Bow-day like every Southdowns town. It is known as the bowyers' town. Direction: STABLE.

The town. The townsfolk say the name means "ash stead," though they grow no ash worth speaking of. The Hearth-yard Yews are the oldest in the downs, and each belongs to the family in whose hearth-yard it stands. Bowyers' Lane runs through the middle of town, a workshop in every house. The Stave House is a long, dry, dark barn where yew staves season two to four years before they are shaped. Wemm's Mill is a ruin on the stream below the town. Ownvos calls itself Wemm's village, and says the girl he won with a hundred arrows at the moon married the miller here.

Life and trade. Ownvos lives by the yew. A bowyer sells an unstrung longbow at his door for seven marks, and Hethlend pays ten. The Crown Wardens buy by the hundred. Children learn early that the yew's berries kill, and a family that owns an old yew guards it like a field. On Bow-day every child in town shoots at a straw hare, and on Wemm's Night the whole town walks out to the mill to shoot at the moon.

People. None of the realm's great names lives here. Every longbowman in Dunt Wrunvos's company carries an Ownvos stave, or says he does.

Hooks. - The Clearance's talk of selling royal forests has the bowyers asking whether the yews on crown land will be sold too. - A Caelvennois factor has offered to buy the whole Stave House, seasoned staves and all, for leusores. Nobody has said yes. - A child's arrow was found in the mill wheel on Wemm's Night with a name carved on it. Nobody in town has that name. - The Crown Wardens have doubled their order for longbows, and nobody has told Ownvos why.

Ownvos is STABLE. So long as Aldmere fights with the longbow it will need Downs yew, and Ownvos will season it. A crusade, or a war with the Cherüsh, would make the town rich.

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Fort · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 2,500 people

The two western roads, one from Codtholk and one from Kemvos, meet at the foot of the Spine, and where they meet stands Durtisir. A gray keep sits on a crag above the crossing, ringed with thornbrakes, and a walled fort-town of barracks, stables and toll-yards crowds the slope below, where the road begins its climb toward Venei's Throat. The toll-men meet you before the gate does.

At a glance. Durtisir is the fortress of the Westmarch and the seat of Duke Minthor Durift, warden of the western passes. It has strong stone walls, a Westmarch garrison and the Duke's household. It lives on the pass tolls of Venei's Throat and the Stair. The Bridge Treaty lets the Westmarch keep a third of them; the Duke keeps nearer half. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known as the Duke's seat, for his toll-men, and for the Marchers, who hold that the Westmarch should be a realm of its own in all but name. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. Westmarch people say the name means "thorn hold," from the thorn the Durifts take their name from, and the Duke's banner is a thorn branch. The Duke's Keep crowns the crag. At the Toll Yard below, caravans for the Throat are counted and charged. The Marchers' Hall is the Duke's court, where his judges sit on Law-day and hear the Westmarch's cases, those of his own toll-men among them. No toll-man has ever been found guilty. The Oweld Gate, named with the Aldmeri word for "throat, narrow pass," faces west up the pass road.

Life and trade. Prices here run a quarter above Codtholk's, and everyone blames the Duke. The crown's rate at the passes is a mark for a pack-beast and three for a wagon. The Toll Yard's rate is whatever the toll-men say. A Qaflan captain complained to Hethlend in 1146 that they took three times the crown's rate and killed a driver who argued. Durift rides to the Moot on the 1st of Halshul and leaves the day it rises.

The Westmarch has distrusted Hethlend since the Lords' War of 822–829, when Duke Yornbael Durift rebelled over the Moot's right to tax. Nor has it forgotten the Westmarch baron who stabbed King Hethlarn I on the Moot's floor in 996.

People. Duke Minthor Durift (47) is a bear of a man, his black beard going gray, with a long white scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, from a Hrodvald axe at Thalmirn in 1127. He is loyal to Aldmere, not to the Tulvards, and he would make a fine king. That is the trouble. His cousin Grerik Coldbrook leads the Vargate Clans. Sneth the Tollman (sneth, "knife") captains the toll-men on the Throat road. He is short, cheerful and well paid.

Hooks. - A young royal auditor has come from Hethlend. The Duke has given her the best room in the keep and every ledger she asks for, and has shown her the Hrodvald shields hung over his gate. - The Duke's steward has come back from Hethlend with news he told only the Duke. - Sneth has been buying Dunmorrow plate for his men from the Under-Venei wagons.

Durtisir is CONTESTED. It holds Aldmere's western passes and much of their wealth, and the crown cannot hold them without it. The Duke has kept to the letter of the law and far from its spirit, and every year the gap is wider. If the king's week of thinking ever turns into a demand, it will be answered here.

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Fort · Kingdom of Aldmere · about 1,200 people

The east road runs out of the Northmere's last farms into long grass, and Lulstat rises out of it: a square stone fort built in the years after 1127, a tall watchtower, a village of turf-roofed houses huddled at its foot, and nothing past it but the Grass Sea running east to the sky. On a clear morning the lookouts on the tower can see riders on the steppe a long way off. This year they have seen them most mornings.

At a glance. Lulstat is Aldmere's easternmost fortress, on the east road in the Northmere, facing the Tsanha fords and the Grass Sea. A castellan holds it for the crown with a garrison of Crown Wardens. It has stone walls and a tower, and an unwalled outer village. It lives on the crown's pay, on the east road, and on horse-trade with whoever comes out of the grass. It keeps the Hearthfaith. It is known as the watch on the Cherüsh. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. The garrison says the name means "east watch," and the Watch Tower is the tallest building between Thalmirn and Tolmar-Buyor. The Fort is a square of curtain walls around barracks, a well, a hall and stables. The crown built it after the Hrodvald raid on Thalmirn in 1127 at last frightened the Moot into paying. The Outer Village houses the garrison's families, smiths, alewives and horse-dealers. The Steppe Gate opens on the road that runs some 260 miles to Tolmar-Buyor, Sarsak Tolmar's camp, and from there to the Jade Gate of Kaishon.

Life and trade. A Crown Warden earns a mark a day with his bread, and there is little to spend it on. The village alehouse charges Hethlend prices for worse ale. The Tsanha Qaflan stop here both ways, and since 1141 every caravan going on east pays the Cherüsh passage gift at Tolmar-Buyor, one bolt in twenty or a balaal a beast. The garrison rides patrols down toward the fords where the Tsanha leaves the lake. That is the crossing Aldmere and Caelvenne fought over in the War of the Tsanha Fords of 911–914, which left Larvir on the Caelvennois side. On Quiet Hearth night the garrison banks its fires and names its dead, and the watch on the tower stays lit.

People. The castellan of Lulstat is not named in any record.

Hooks. - The castellan's patrols have seen Cherüsh riders at the fords every dawn for weeks. They never come closer. - A rider under a white felt banner has asked at the Steppe Gate for Prince Hethbael, not the king. - The Outer Village has no wall, and the alewives have begun sleeping inside the fort. - A Crown Warden deserted east with two horses, and Cherüsh riders brought the horses back.

Lulstat is CONTESTED. It was built to stop Hrodvald raiders, and it now faces something larger: a united Horde of 80,000 riders some days' ride east. It has never been tried. Whether it is a fortress or a trading post may hang on a letter nobody at Lulstat is allowed to open.

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The Dunmorrow live in nine fortress-mines in the northern Karzhan Spine, each carved into its own mountain and ruled by its own Thane. The Thanes meet at the Deep Moot at midwinter in every year ending in 5; the last sat in 1145, and the next will sit in 1155. From 380 to 555 the holds were one, the Kingdom Under the Spine, until Castavar and Aldmere besieged them together and broke it. They quarrel without end and have never fought one another since. They sell steel, plate, starsteel ingots and the best Gap mules to every side, take gold where they can and silver otherwise, and bring in some 300,000 leusores a year. They buy grain, cloth, wine and salt. Their gates open only for trade.

Inside, the holds share one way of life. The galleries are lit by tended delver moss. Crag choughs nest in the upper shafts, and blind delver crickets live in the lower. Below ground the hours are rung on the forge-bell, the luadeft, and because the Dunmorrow never say a number aloud in the deep, numbers are written, not spoken. They keep Aldmere's Hearth week in their own tongue. Every Dunmorrow adds an iron ring to the beard, or to the belt, for each masterwork. Each hold's Thane judges its people, and the worst sentence is exile. Their faith is the worship of ancestors in stone. They believe the mountain is a forge, and that the Underkings were those who could hear the anvil ring. At every feast an empty chair waits for the last Underking. The deepest holds were dug into older mines, and the Dunmorrow know someone dug before the Underkings. Dunmorri is a hold-tongue of Aldmeri, with a smiths' cant no outsider learns, and the holds keep their craft in a guild-script. Only Harrowdeep is marked on the map.

Harrowdeep Hold

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 7,000 people

The road to Harrowdeep follows the young Wenvorm up into the Spine until the river is a stream a man can step across. Then the valley closes in a wall of gray rock with a gate in it: two iron doors under a carved lintel, a paved yard, and a stone gate-hall built out from the cliff. That is all of Harrowdeep an outsider sees. Behind the doors the mountain is hollow a mile down, but the traveler does his business in the gate-hall, under delver moss, with forge smoke drifting from vents high in the cliff.

At a glance. Harrowdeep is the largest of the nine holds, a fortress-mine near the headwaters of the Wenvorm. Thane Grurn Harrowdeep rules it and is counted first among the nine Thanes. Its walls are the mountain itself, and iron doors that open only for trade. It lives on starsteel, steel and plate. Its people worship their ancestors in stone, and its Thane claims descent from the Underkings. It is known for the starsteel sold at its gate. Direction: STABLE.

The hold. The Gate-Hall is the only part of Harrowdeep outsiders enter. There ingots and armor are shown, weighed and sold, and buyers from Zarvand and Castavar are kept on opposite sides of the room. Behind the doors the Arch Road runs back into the mountain under ranks of moss-lit arches to the Thane's Hall, where Grurn keeps the empty chair for the last Underking and sits in it when drunk. Below lie the Forge Levels, where starsteel is made, and below those the Old Workings, galleries the Dunmorrow did not dig. They know someone dug them before the Underkings, and they do not like to say so to outsiders.

Life and trade. An ingot of starsteel for one blade costs about four leusores at the Gate-Hall. In Mazbaaran the finished sword sells for fifteen talod and up. A knight's full suit of Dunmorrow plate costs eighty leusores at the hold. Grain, wine and salt come up the Wenvorm valley on Gap mules bred in the holds. Grurn sells starsteel to Zarvand, armor to Castavar, and the same news to both. Harrowdeep holds its own midwinter feast every year, and in the years of the Deep Moot its Thane goes on to the Moot afterward.

People. Thane Grurn Harrowdeep (67) is short and dense as ore, his beard braided with iron rings, nine of them, his hands scarred white by fifty years at the forge. He is honest in trade and closed in all else, and he holds that the surface is a market and nothing more. He says he hears the anvil under the Spine when he drinks.

Hooks. - Tesk Deepsong's Restorers want Grurn proclaimed Underking, and they mean to take him at his word the next time he says it at a midwinter feast. - A Castavari buyer and a Zarvani buyer both asked the Gate-Hall for the same order this year, and Grurn filled both. - Smiths working the Old Workings have found black stone in the walls. - Aldmere and Castavar, who broke the last Underking together, both keep factors at the Gate-Hall, and both are listening.

Harrowdeep is STABLE. Every side needs its steel, and every side pays. Its danger is its Thane's blood. The Restorers want an Underking. If Grurn ever says yes sober and the peoples of the Spine follow him, the passes would close and three realms would starve.

Ironvein

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 4,000 people · not marked on the map

Ironvein is the iron hold, dug into a mountain striped with red ore in the northern Spine toward the Vargate. Its gate-yard is full of bar iron stacked like firewood and the red dust of the ore carts. It makes less starsteel than Harrowdeep and far more plain iron and steel: axe heads, nails, chain, wagon tires. Most of it goes north and east along the Spine's three-cornered trade, to the Vargate Clans for timber and to Clan Nugag, whose chieftain Thuba Nugag trades with the Dunmorrow more than she raids them. A Dunmorrow steel axe that reaches Krasvuv on the Fur Trail fetches about a gold crown's weight there, and most of those axes are Ironvein's. The hold's Thane is a close ally of Grurn's in the Deep Moot, because Ironvein sells to everyone and wants no Underking who might stop it. Its iron keeps the Tinkers' Wain in work, and the Tinkers claim descent from Dunmorrow exiles. Ironvein denies it loudly and buys their mending. Direction: STABLE.

Coldshaft

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 2,500 people · not marked on the map

Coldshaft is the highest and northernmost of the holds, and snow shuts its gate-road half the year. Its name comes from the air shafts that run from its deepest galleries to the peaks, and the Dunmorrow say you can hear the wind singing in them down in the deep. The shafts keep the lower galleries cool enough to store food through a siege. Coldshaft makes steel and lives mostly on its stores. It trades in summer, when mule trains come up with grain and salt; in winter it is cut off and quiet. Among the other holds its people are known for silence, even as Dunmorrow go, and its Thane speaks at the Deep Moot only once, at the end. Delver marmots whistle on its high meadows in summer, and Coldshaft children are taught that the whistle is the mountain's alarm. Direction: STABLE.

Sallowdeep

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 3,000 people · not marked on the map

Sallowdeep is the moss hold. Its lower galleries are given over to beds of delver moss, the glowing green moss that lights every Dunmorrow shaft, and the pale light of the moss gardens gives the hold its name. Sallowdeep grows moss for all nine holds and trades it for steel and grain, and so its Thane has a quiet hand in every quarrel at the Deep Moot: a hold that crosses Sallowdeep may find its galleries dimmer by spring. Blind delver crickets live thick in the moss beds, and the gardeners eat them roasted. The hold mines and forges like any other, but outsiders who reach its gate buy moss-cuttings as often as blades. The cuttings die within a season away from the deep, which the Dunmorrow think only fair. Direction: STABLE.

Marrow's Gate

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 2,000 people · not marked on the map

Marrow's Gate faces west, on the Spine's far side above the Greenwarden. Its ancestor-halls are the oldest in the holds. Every hold keeps ancestor stones, but the stones of Marrow's Gate are said to stand over the bones of the first delvers, and Thanes of other holds come here to swear the oaths they mean to keep. The hold mines copper and makes steel. From its western lookouts the smiths look down on the redwood canopy, and from its cliffs they have seen the painted caves of the Screefolk, whose red ochre ibex the Dunmorrow say are older than the Underkings. Marrow's Gate does not trade with the Waheli, who kill outsiders, and does not trouble the Screefolk, whom the Waheli protect. Its Thane has said at the Deep Moot that some of the ochre ibex are painted as well in the lowest galleries of Marrow's Gate, where no Screefolk has ever been. Direction: FADING. Its copper is thinning, and its young leave for Harrowdeep.

Hammerhold

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 4,000 people · not marked on the map

Hammerhold is the armorers' hold, and the hold of the Restorers. It was the heart of the heavy foot of the old Kingdom Under the Spine, whose armored ranks even Tharax respected, and its people still drill in plate in the great hall on feast days. Hammerhold claims the deepest shaft in the Spine, down which Grarg the Proud's hammer was thrown when the kingdom fell in 555. The hammer is said to be falling still, and when it lands the kingdom will return. Harrowdeep disputes the claim, since it wants the shaft too. Tesk Deepsong, the finest armorer alive, is often seen here, and her Restorers are strongest here. Tesk has been down the shaft and does not say what she found. The Restorers want one Underking again, against the Thanes, who would keep each hold its own. Hammerhold's plate is sold to all sides, and so is Tesk's own work, among it the twin suits she made for Grand Master Tirago and Prince Faasheer. Direction: CONTESTED.

The Nine Lamps

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 2,500 people · not marked on the map

The Nine Lamps is where the Deep Moot meets. Nine iron lamps hang from the roof of its council hall, one for each hold, and each Thane lights a lamp on taking a seat at midwinter in the years ending in 5. A lamp that goes out during the Moot is an omen against its hold, so each Thane brings oil from home and trusts no other hold's. Between Moots the hold is quiet, a steel-making hold of middling size whose people are proud to keep the hall. Its Thane is counted neutral, since all the holds feed the Nine Lamps in Moot years and it gains nothing from quarrels. After the Moot of 1145 the Nine Lamps' Thane said that one lamp had guttered, and he will not say whose. Direction: STABLE.

Graywater Hold

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 3,000 people · not marked on the map

Graywater Hold takes its name from the stream that leaves its lower gate, clouded gray with rock-flour from the mine. Below the gate the valley opens into high meadows, and there Graywater breeds the Dunmorrow's Gap mules, the sure-footed beasts that carry everything through the passes and that nobody breeds better. Mule-buyers from Aldmere, Tharax and the Gap Wardens come to the meadows every summer, and a Graywater mule is worth more than a Heartland gray horse. The hold also makes steel and armor and trades it through its gate like the rest. Its people are the Dunmorrow most often seen above ground, and the other holds tease them for sunburn. Direction: STABLE.

Under-Venei

Hold · Dunmorrow · about 1,500 people · not marked on the map

Under-Venei sits beneath Venei's Throat, the army pass between the Westmarch and the Greenwarden, and keeps a tunnel under the pass. It charges both the Waheli and Aldmere to use it. The tunnel lets a traveler pass under the Throat without climbing it, and without walking past the Castavari shields the Waheli nailed to the trees at the forest's edge in 734. Under-Venei is the smallest hold and, for its size, the richest. It lives on its tolls, on steel sold east through Durtisir, and on keeping its own counsel. Its Thane has never said what the Waheli carry through the tunnel. Aldmere's clerks at Durtisir believe the Waheli do not pass at all, and that what they pay is the price of keeping the tunnel shut to loggers. Direction: STABLE.

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Council ring · Waheli · speaks for about 30,000 people

No road goes to the Circle of Roots. A Waheli walking there follows her Grove's paths between warden redwoods a hundred feet across, through ferns to the waist, while warden woodpeckers drum signals from tree to tree. In the middle of the Greenwarden she comes to a clearing where the redwoods stand back in a ring, and inside it the circle mushrooms have grown in rings of their own. There is no house, no fire and no wall, and nobody speaks loudly.

At a glance. The Circle of Roots is the council that governs the Waheli and their seven Groves, and the map marks its seat here. Its eldest is Elder Wiroll, who lives at the Old Grove. The Greenwarden is guarded by its size, its archers and its law, which is death for trespassers without warning. The Waheli live on warden elk, salmon and root fern, and trade only through Moss Harbor. Their faith is the Green, which holds that the oldest trees are the Builders of the Age of Ruins, asleep. Direction: STABLE, and divided.

The Circle. The Circle sits inside the mushroom rings, and the Waheli say that if the rings ever grow in a line instead, the Circle will split. Around the clearing stand the Seven Trees, where the elders of Hollowmere, the Edge, Deepshade, the Fallen Grove, Moss Harbor, the Venei Grove and the Old Grove sit. Elder Wiroll walks here from the Old Grove, where no outsider has ever been. At the Judging Ground, a bare patch at the ring's edge, the warden-hunters with their bloodroot hands stand during a death case.

Life and trade. The Waheli keep moons, not months, and count no years. In the silence moon, Veval, which comes about one year in two, the Circle does not sit, no one cuts a name-bark, and no one touches a living tree. A child's name is carved on bark and buried at a redwood's root, and at death it is dug up and burned. The Waheli speak in whispers and have no writing. Moss Harbor trades fish, herbs and bark medicines with the Coastwrights and the Salt Brotherhood for salt and iron, never for tools that cut trees, and the Circle pays Under-Venei a toll for its tunnel.

The Circle's rule is to hold the edge and kill trespassers, nothing more. Viwal Stainhand's Reaping would make the edge a hundred miles of corpses. The Bark-Singers, cast out a hundred years ago for wanting to wake the sleepers, sing in the northern marsh where the Circle does not go.

People. Elder Wiroll (in his nineties) has not left the Greenwarden in seventy years and keeps the shields of 734 nailed up. Viwal Stainhand (45), whose right hand is stained black with bloodroot, argues for the Reaping. Maesra of the Edge (22) has killed six trespassers with one arrow each, and twice let one live.

Hooks. - The Groves whisper that Maesra has spared a third trespasser, a Castavari surveyor, and that Viwal has found his tracks. - A Castavari envoy is said to be walking toward the forest under a green branch, to buy redwoods for masts. - The mushroom rings in the clearing have grown in an oval this year. Some elders call it a circle and some do not.

The Circle of Roots is STABLE, and divided. No logger has come out of the Greenwarden since 734, but the Circle's law of silence and death is pulled from both sides: by the Reaping's wish to kill more, and by Maesra's mercy.

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City · Castavar · about 25,000 people

The royal road from Corendrosa comes down out of dry hills into a broad valley, and the city's name is simply the Castavari word for one, tinoda. In Litota, the month of penance in the dead of winter, the whole valley floor turns white, because the almond orchards bloom when nothing else does, and a traveler rides the last miles to the walls through blossom falling like snow. The caravans come in the same season. The first sound of Tinoda in winter is camel bells from the east road. The first smell after the blossom is pepper, dates and camel dung from the caravan yards outside the East Gate.

At a glance. Tinoda is the crown's city, ruled by a royal governor. The Grandees who own the orchards keep town houses inside the walls, and the Bishop of Tinoda preaches the crusade from its cathedral. A whitewashed curtain wall closes the old town on its low rise; the caravan quarter lies outside. The city lives on almonds, on the royal road that rings the realm, and on the western end of the Spice Way, which runs 748 miles and about 38 days from Mazbaaran by way of Kebidaan, Daalher and the fort of Cluvedo. Its faith is the Berrode, watched over by a house of the Office of Truth, while the Qaflan leave their coins for the Road Spirit at the caravan gate. It is known for winter almond blossom, for Castavar's quietest trade with the realm it crusades against, and for the saying that a Tinoda merchant prays against Zarvand in the morning and sells to it after lunch. Its direction is RISING, because the poorer the crown grows, the richer the trade through the East Gate.

The town. The old town sits on a rise above a stream that waters the orchards, the cathedral and the governor's house at its top, the Grandees' courtyard houses below. For half the year the city's heart lies outside the walls. The Crorale (crorale, "market") is the walled caravan yard beyond the East Gate: camel lines, warehouses, a Qaflan letter-house of the Salt-Bearers, and inns where Zarvani caravan-masters sleep, since the Berrode will not have an idolater sleep inside the walls. The ground belongs to a Grandee family, which takes a market due on every load and hears no complaints about who pays it. The Searching House stands in the East Gate itself. Here the Office of Truth's clerks open bales for star tables, poppy and Zarvani medicine, and the smugglers know which clerk to stand in front of. The Almond Walk is the orchard track along the stream. The Valley Cathedral is a fortified church in the Castavari manner, thick-walled and plain within. On a spur above the east road, the Beacon is the last of the fire-beacons that carry warning from Cluvedo in a night.

Life and trade. Tinoda's people pick almonds in Larronlo, shell them all autumn, and sell them from Grarañe to Solvaine; Tinoda almonds with honey end a Grandee's supper in the capital. A pound of shelled almonds costs half a jabirga in the city, and a bed and supper at a Crorale inn a jabirga. The caravans open with the cool season in Corenva, the Zarvani Mozaaft, and run until spring. They bring pepper, saffron, dates, incense, paper and coffee, and take Castavari red, oil and silver, which the Zarvani have bought by way of Daalher even in crusade years. A pound of Nhal pepper that cost a quarter balaal on the Nhal sells in the Crorale for two and a half jabirga. The city argues whether that trade is treason, and then goes back to it.

In Litota, when no music is allowed, the bishop walks the orchards on the first morning without a word, and the city follows him through the blossom. Tinoda calls it doing its penance in white. The city also says Llelilo the Pious marched out of its East Gate with his 30,000 in 699, and that the blossom that year fell brown.

People. No one of great name lives in Tinoda, but its trade touches several. Zarrit the changer in Mazbaaran has changed more Castavari silver this year than in the last five, for men who are not merchants, and much of that silver left Castavar through the Crorale. Mozaaft of the Deep Sands, who speaks enough Castavari to sell to them, is known to the caravan-masters in its yards by his gold tooth.

Hooks. - A silver chest went east through the Crorale in spring under a Grandee's seal, and a chest with the same seal came back empty. - The Searching House found a bound copy of the star tables inside a bale of Kebidaan pistachios. The clerk who found it has not reported it, and has cleared a shelf. - The tanners have a crown order for four thousand water-skins, not yet paid for, and nobody will say whether they are bound for Corendrosa or Cluvedo. - Two Qaflan caravans of the Salt-Bearers refused to lodge beside a third that flies a broken wheel.

City · Castavar · about 18,000 people

The royal road from Tinoda runs ten days west and south across dry hills and comes down at last onto flat, glittering ground. Rice paddies stand in shallow water behind low dikes. The salt lagoons past them are streaked pink with flamingos, and white cones of raked salt line the pans like tents. Sonvera sits on a limestone spit between the lagoons and the open sea, a whitewashed town with a cathedral, a mole, and a handful of galleons riding at anchor. The wind smells of salt and marsh mud. Past the mole there is nothing but water, and somewhere out there, about two hundred miles off, lie the Shattered Isles.

At a glance. The king rules Sonvera through a royal governor and the captain of the navy's Sonvera squadron, while the Grandee of Sonvera holds the paddies and pans around it. It is the seat of the Bishop of Lasdara, whose southern diocese covers the old cork-oak country inland. A sea wall guards the harbor, and a land wall closes the spit on the Tinoda road side. The city lives on Sonvera rice, on the lagoon salt Castavar sells as far as Tharax, on fishing, and on the lesser of the navy's two bases, which keeps a squadron facing the Isles. Its faith is the Berrode in the cathedral and the Salt-Sworn on the waterfront, with the Grove of Lasdara in the villages up the Gusda road. It is known for rice with almonds, flamingos, salt, and as the birthplace of Lonre of the Long Reach. Its direction is FADING, because its squadron is being stripped for the crusade's transports and its young men keep sailing for the Isles.

The town. The spit runs east to west. The Pans fill the lagoon shore south of town, a checkerboard of shallow drying beds worked by salt-rakers in straw hats. The Rice Marsh lies north behind the dikes, where the planters live in whitewashed farmsteads raised a yard above the water. The Squadron Mole shelters the galleons at the spit's eastern end, with its rope sheds, biscuit ovens and a chapel. The Bishop's Close at the center holds the cathedral of the diocese of Lasdara, the one building in Sonvera with storks on every tower. The Gusda Gate (gusda, "cork oak") opens the land wall onto the inland road that climbs into the cork-oak country. The Office of Truth's riders go out by it, and do not always come back by it. At the spit's western tip, the Watch Rock keeps a fire basket that is lit when a Brotherhood sail is sighted.

Life and trade. The paddies are planted in Rarveñe and cut in Nirlona, and the rice goes up the royal road to Grarañe, where it is cooked with Tinoda almonds for the Grandees. Salt is raked in high summer, when the Furnace Wind blows hot off the Sunmaw and the coasters anchor rather than sail. Sonvera says the wind that stops the ships makes the salt. Sixteen pounds of lagoon salt cost a jabirga at the Pans. Much of it goes north by mule on the Gap Road to Tharax, which has no salt of its own. Four dried octopus cost a quarter jabirga, and fish, rice and bread are the daily meal. The squadron pays in silver and pays late, and the town lives on credit between paydays, as Tandosa does.

Sonvera's sailors take their first oath on a cup of lagoon water at the foot of the mole, and Tandosa men say lagoon water is not the sea. With the bishop's windows looking down on the harbor, the Salt-Sworn keep their voices lower here than in Tandosa. The Hearing, Litota and the Feast of Grace are kept as in the capital.

People. Lonre of the Long Reach, captain of the Brotherhood's eastern crew, was born in Sonvera, and the Rice Marsh remembers her as a planter's daughter who could swim before she could walk. Captain Modarsa Tandosno hunts the Brotherhood from Tandosa, and Nietie the Senior Captain commands the transport-building from there. The Grandee of Sonvera, who hates the Brotherhood in public and buys back its prizes in private, keeps a town house by the Close. The names of the squadron's captain and the bishop are not given.

Hooks. - Nietie has ordered three of Sonvera's galleons to Tandosa to escort the new transports, and the fire basket on the Watch Rock has been lit twice since they left. - Lonre's mother still lives in the Rice Marsh, the Grandee of Sonvera's household knows it, and a Coastwright boat has been seen at the mole. - An Office of Truth party rode out of the Gusda Gate for the cork villages and came back one man short. - If the crusade shuts the Gap, the Pans lose their best buyer. The salt-rakers have begun asking what Tharax pays in.

City · Castavar · about 28,000 people

From Grarañe the road climbs eight days through holm-oak hills, following the upper Llovo toward the mountains, and meets the mule trains coming down. They come in strings of forty under guard, each mule carrying ingots sewn into leather. Puesdro sits where the valley narrows below the silver country, a whitewashed city with a citadel on its upper rock and smelter smoke lying over its lower town. Charcoal carts line the road for a mile outside the gates. Past the city the road runs on northeast toward the Tharaxi Gap, and every Castavari army since Clislo II has marched up it.

At a glance. A royal governor rules Puesdro from the citadel, but the Grandees who own the Silverhead Mines, led by the Grandee of Puesdro, keep houses here, and their stewards run the city's business. A massive curtain wall faces the Gap road, and the citadel is the strongest fortress on Castavar's Tharaxi frontier. The city lives on silver: smelting and assaying the ore that comes down from the Silverhead Mines, some sixty miles up the valley; sending the ingots to the Royal Mint; and feeding the mines charcoal, rope, mules and men. In quiet years it lives on the Gap Road as well, sending salt, wine and oil to Tharax and taking back wool, grain, iron and falcons. Its faith is the Berrode, with the miners' belief that the silver is the tears of angels. It is known for silver, for the drove-road law, and as the muster ground of every army bound for the Gap. Its direction is CONTESTED, because the Rislo wants its mines, the crusade may want its road, and Tharax may shut the Gap in its face.

The town. The citadel crowns the upper rock with the governor's house and a fortified church. Lloviermo (lloviermo, "silvery") is the street below it where the assayers, silversmiths and the Grandees' stewards work, and where the mine books are kept in the Caelvennois ledger figures that the Office of Truth calls "the heretic's arithmetic." The Smelter Quarter fills the lower town along the river, its furnaces fed on Puesdro holm-oak charcoal, its streets gray with ash. The Drove Street crosses the lower town from gate to gate, because the Upland Shepherds' drove-road runs through it, and every Castavari knows that no Upland Shepherd may be arrested on the drove-road. The watch stands at each end of the street and waits. Outside the Gap Gate lies the Muster Field, a beaten plain where Clislo II's 40,000 camped in 206 and Dobarmo IV's 35,000 in 1139. The Gap Wardens' inns and mule yards crowd its edge.

Life and trade. Every child in Puesdro knows the sums. A pound of silver strikes eighty jabirga at the Royal Mint, and the mint keeps one in twenty. The Grandees pay the crown a fifth of their silver in ingots, and the crown's share leaves Castavar as interest to Farisel almost as fast as it is struck. A smelter's laborer earns a jabirga a day, a skilled assayer two. A bed at a Gap Wardens' inn costs a jabirga, a good mule about fifty, and a trader taking one through the Gap pays the Tharaxi at Lokon a bar a beast, which he must buy for two and a quarter jabirga. People eat bread, chickpeas, mutton from the drove flocks, and Upland ibex when the hunters bring one down. The Puesdro lynx that once hunted the scrub is nearly gone.

In Llusodo, when the Tharaxi month Lokok ("pass") opens the Gap, Puesdro's traders gather at the Gap Gate to watch for the year's first Tharaxi mule train, and the first man to sight it buys the wine. The miners say the veins run toward Grarañe because the angels were looking at the cliff, and Puesdro adds that the silver has been running away from Puesdro ever since.

People. Godode the Convoy-Master is a gray, heavy-shouldered old ratorlon sergeant who has taken the ingot trains down to the Royal Mint for twenty years without losing a bar. His name means "ready." He hands the ingots to Binto the Weigher in Grarañe and brings back the news. Rislo Litoto's plan to seize the mines "for God" would make the city the church's, and if Grand Master Arsoso Tirago leads the Fourth Crusade through the Gap, he will camp on the Muster Field.

Hooks. - Clerks from the Rislo's Close have been copying the mine books in Lloviermo, and the Grandees' stewards have been handing them the church-numeral books, not the real ones. - A Dunmorrow wagon under heavy guard came through the Gap Gate and took the Grarañe road without stopping. - Godode has been ordered to deliver the next royal fifth to the Close instead of the Mint, and he has asked for the order in writing. - A man in a shepherd's cloak has stood on the Drove Street three days. The Office of Truth waits at one end, the watch at the other, and the shepherds say he is not one of theirs. - The Gap Wardens are hiring every mule in the valley, and nobody has told them whether Tharax will honor the safe-conduct.

Town · Tharax · about 5,000 people

The road south from Tharxa climbs through the Sastorid Crags, and Sastorra shows on a shoulder of rock above the young Talodin, plain gray stone and timber with nothing carved or painted. The Tharaxi hear sastor, "spear," in its name, as they hear it in the royal line. From the lower terraces you can look down the valley to a spur where the walls of Faashab-Talodin stand. The town has watched them three hundred years.

At a glance. The Skekar governs Sastorra from Tharxa, and the old Sastorid households, King Lekakor's kin, carry its weight. Like every Tharaxi town it has no walls. It lives on goats, Spine sheep and terrace barley worked by the Bound, on the garrison that watches the Zarvani fortress, and on a quiet trade with the fortress's camp town. Its faith is Kharnoth and the Ancestors, with the Furrow among the Bound in secret and the Hearthfaith among the Outdwellers. It is known for the Spear Hall of the Sastorid line, and for its view of what the garrison calls "the three-century insult." Its direction is RISING, because the Sastorid king's case for Tharax's future runs through this valley, and whoever holds the headwaters holds Zarvand.

The town. The Meksan (meksan, "crag") is the upper town, where the Sastorid households live behind walled goat-yards. At its top stands the Spear Hall, where a spear hangs for each Sastorid king. King Drimor's hangs point-down, because a Bound servant killed him in his tent in 520. Since then no Bound has served under that roof, and here alone in Tharax an Outdweller clears Kharnoth's plate. The Talodin Post is a stone watch post on the lower terrace looking down-valley at the fortress; the garrison calls it the Insult. The Strangers' Yard, where the Mazbaaran road leaves town, holds mule pens and the only wine-house on the Tharaxi side of the valley, because no foreigner may sleep anywhere else. Between the town and the fortress, where the valley walls close, lies the Narrows, which Tharaxi surveyors have lately been measuring.

Life and trade. The Bound herd goats on the high meadows and work the terraces, and the Phymon women own the land and keep the tallies. Headwater trout and snow grouse fill the pot in season. Salt, dates and cloth come up from the Tail, the fortress's camp town, and goats, barley, cheese and iron bars go down. Salt costs a tenth of a bar a pound here, half the Tharxa price. A jug of Castavari red in the wine-house costs half a bar, and only foreigners and Outdwellers drink it. Sastorra keeps Wardens' Day, the Three Days and the Harvest Watch like the rest of Tharax.

People. King Lekakor Sastorid is kin to every old household on the Meksan. Kouther the Wine-Keeper, an Outdweller, keeps the Yard's wine-house, speaks the Zarvani of the Tail, and says nothing in any tongue about who drinks in his back room. His name means "safe."

Hooks. - Men who say they speak for Prince Faasheer met Tharaxi officers in Kouther's back room, and the fortress itself is said to be on offer to King Kenithor. - The surveyors at the Narrows carry figures for how much stone a dam would need. - The Tyrthas has asked Kouther who has drunk in the Yard since Wardens' Day. He answered that a wine-keeper forgets faces, which is not an answer the Tyrthas accepts twice.

Town · Tharax · about 8,000 people

East-southeast of Tharxa the Barley Brook runs down into lower, softer country, and the terraces multiply until whole hillsides are stepped like stairs. Lowfields sits where they are thickest: stone granaries, a garrison hall, rows of fieldstone huts, and where the road comes in, the bare posts on which Tharax hangs its warnings. From every slope comes singing in dasthax, the field-talk of the Bound, with the softer vowels of the Lowfields. The songs stop when a red cloak passes and start again after.

At a glance. Lowfields answers to the Skekar, and more closely to the Tyrthas, whose head, Senior Skekir Sirtys Gonamik, knows the name of every Bound village headman around it. It has no walls, only a garrison hall for a Phymon company rotated from the capital. It lives on barley, most of it sent up the brook as the mess-share of Tharxa's halls, and on the market that serves the province. Its faith is Kharnoth for the few hundred Phymun, and the Furrow, a hanging crime, for nearly everyone else. It is known for the Rising of 520 and the executions of "the quiet year" in 938. Its direction is CONTESTED, because the Tyrthas and a hidden web of men it has not found are counting the same villages.

The town. The Kounon (kounon, "market") is the largest barley market in Tharax, a square ringed by Outdweller smithies and cheese sheds, where Phymon women sell surplus by tally-board. The Great Granaries on the rise hold the mess-share for the carts. The Warning Posts stand at the Tharxa road, where a Bound who reads, keeps the Furrow or strikes a Phymon is hanged and left. The Headmen's Stone below the Granaries is where village headmen report to the garrison on the first day of each ten. East of the terraces lies the Quiet Field, where two thousand Bound died in 938. The Bound have another name for it and do not say it aloud.

Life and trade. The Bound work the terraces from the age of six, are fed and not paid, and eat barley porridge, bread and onions. A loaf of black bread costs a tenth of a bar in the Kounon, a sickle one bar, a Spine sheep twelve. In Tandox, the harvest month, the Harvest Watch is kept more closely here than anywhere, and the Tyrthas sends extra men into the villages. Old Bound women keep the herb-lore, which suits the Sowers of the Furrow, and a Sower scratches a furrow under the first stone laid over every Bound grave.

People. Tandox the Bound (29), a Lowfields field-foreman, can read, which is a crime, and has spent five years building a web of men here, one trusted man at a time. His grandmother was a Sower. Sirtys Gonamik (58) knows which headman she will hang first if the Lowfields stir. Kirrar the Landholder, head of the Tryner household, holds more Lowfields terrace than anyone, and the Quiet Field lies on her land.

Hooks. - The Tyrthas has found a furrow-mark on a dead woman's forearm in the village next to Tandox's. - A nineteen-year-old Phymon doing her year in the Tyrthas has been billeted in a Lowfields village and told to listen. - The Bound family seen at Denekt's Ladder Inn came from here. - Word has reached the terraces that the Tolmar on the Grass Sea promises a horse to any free rider.

Fort · Tharax · about 700 people

The road south from Tharxa runs into the Sastorid Crags and turns west toward the Gap, and at the turn it passes through Lokon: a plain stone gatehouse set across the road where it squeezes between two crags, with a barrack, a mule yard, and a signal platform on the higher rock. The Tharaxi hear lokok, "pass," in its name. Gap falcons ride the updrafts, mule bells come up from the west, and the only ornament is rust on the gate's iron straps.

At a glance. A captain named by the Skekar commands a Phymon company of about four hundred, rotated from Tharxa. Lokon has no curtain wall. The Phymun say it is a door, not a wall, and a door is shut by men. It lives on the pass toll of one iron bar a beast on the Gap Road, and on the Gap Wardens' mule trade. Its faith is Kharnoth, with the Road Spirit among the Wardens' Qaflan. It has watched every Castavari army come up from Puesdro since Clislo II's in 206. Its direction is CONTESTED, because in 1147 its gate may have to answer two kings at once.

The town. The Gate is a vaulted passage wide enough for two loaded mules, shut at night by oak doors bound in Kokekt iron. At the Toll Stone beside it the beasts are counted and the bars paid. A trader without bars pays silver at the Gold House rate of two marks to the bar, sent to Tharxa under seal. The Barrack holds the company and its mess. The Wardens' Yard is Lokon's Strangers' Yard, inns and stables kept by the Gap Wardens, where every foreigner must sleep. From the Lookout above the Gate a path runs south to the Field of the Gap.

Life and trade. The Gap Wardens, half of them Outdwellers and half the unacknowledged sons of Castavari masesben, drive the mules and keep the inns. A Gap mule costs sixty bars and a trained Gap falcon forty. Salt, wine, oil and silver come up from Puesdro; wool, grain, iron and falcons go down. The garrison doses its stomach with Gap gentian root and tells of the king who poured a melted Caelvennois gold coin into the pass road. On the Three Days, the 10th to 12th of Xert, the company marches to the Field of the Gap, keeps silence at meals, and speaks the names of the dead on the third day, and the Castavari in the Wardens' Yard stay indoors.

People. The Third Crusade came through Lokon's gate in 1139 under safe-conduct, with King Kenithor Deneskid guarding its flank; he came back with his left forearm broken by a Castavari bolt. The captain's name is not given.

Hooks. - A Castavari column is expected to test the Gap under a safe-conduct that may not be honored, and a seventeen-year-old Phymon woman has been seen on the Lookout. - If Kenithor grants the Fourth Crusade safe-conduct and Lekakor forbids it, Lokon's captain will hold two orders under two kings' seals. - The toll count is a third below last year's, and the Gold House wants to know whether the traders are staying home or finding another way over the Spine.

Fort · Castavar · about 2,000 people

Five days south of Grarañe the royal road climbs a long olive-covered rise, and at the top stands Corendrosa, square and white, its curtain walls so massive that the road does not go around them but through them. You enter by one gate, cross the outer ward under the eyes of its crossbowmen, and leave by the other. Below the south wall a walled village spills down the slope among olive and cork trees. Storks nest on the chapel tower, and in summer the cicadas in the oaks drown out the drill sergeants.

At a glance. A castellan of the king's household commands a garrison of about six hundred ratorlon, pikemen and crossbowmen of the royal army, and answers to the king alone. Its whitewashed curtain walls are among the heaviest in Castavar, built to guard the capital's southern approach. The fortress lives on the crown's pay, which comes late, on the traffic of the royal road, and on the olives and wine of the Royal Demesne around it. Its faith is the Berrode. It is known as the first station of the royal ring south of Grarañe, and as the capital's shield. Its direction is STABLE, because whoever wins in Grarañe will need its walls and its granaries.

The town. The Road Ward is the outer ward the royal road crosses between the North Gate and the South Gate, where carts are counted and couriers change horses. The Keep stands in the inner ward with the castellan's hall and the arsenal of crank-wound arbalests. The King's Granaries, long vaulted stores under the east wall, hold grain, biscuit and oil for armies marching south. The Chapel of the Thorn is a small fortified chapel whose hawthorn hedge the garrison clips on the Feast of Grace. The Water Stair runs down inside the west wall to the wells, the fortress's great secret and its great weakness.

Life and trade. A ratorlon soldier is paid half a jabirga a day and his bread, late, and the village lives by selling him everything else. Almond carts from Tinoda, rice from Sonvera and wine for the capital all pass through the Road Ward. A bed and supper at the Gate House inn in the village costs a jabirga, and a jug of Llovo red cut with water a quarter jabirga. The garrison drills on the slope below the walls in the morning and shutters itself against the heat like every Castavari town. Half the garrison's young men walk west to the Llovo March for the bull-runs in Llusodo, and all of them keep Litota and the Feast of Grace.

People. The Tirago family, a masesben house of the Demesne, holds a tower near Corendrosa, and its best-known son is Grand Master Arsoso Tirago of the White Thorn. The castellan is a younger son of a Grandee family, and said to be one of the Crownmen of Grarañe, who hold that the king should rule and the Rislo pray.

Hooks. - The King's Granaries have been ordered filled with biscuit and water for twenty thousand men, which points to an army marching south, not one sailing from Tandosa. - A prisoner of the Office of Truth passed through the Road Ward in a closed cart and never reached Grarañe. - The castellan has been sent a letter in the queen's hand and has not answered it. Brother Talvo would like to know what it said. - If the Rislo moves against the Grandees' mines, Corendrosa's six hundred are the nearest soldiers to the capital who answer to the king.

Fort · Castavar · about 1,200 people

A week's ride east of Tinoda the almond valley gives way to scrub, the scrub to brown hills, and the hills to a last ridge. Cluvedo sits on it, a whitewashed fortress with square towers, looking east over nothing. Past it the road runs almost two hundred miles through dry country to Zarvand's Daalher. Upland vultures circle the ridge, yellow scorpions live in the stone, and the heat comes off the Sunmaw like the breath of an oven.

At a glance. A castellan of the crown commands about five hundred ratorlon, and a few knights of the Order of the White Thorn keep a small house inside the walls. The curtain walls close around a cistern cut into the ridge, which is why a fortress can stand here at all. It lives on the crown's pay and on the Spice Way caravans, which must water here before or after the dry country. Its faith is the Berrode at its most warlike. It is known as the Holy Crown's watchpost on the frontier of the Flame, the last Castavari walls before the desert. Its direction is FADING, because its garrison has been thinned for the crusade, its walls have not been mended since 1139, and its soldiers trade with the enemy more than they watch him.

The town. The Cistern under the inner ward is the fortress's heart, and the castellan keeps its key. The Desert Gate faces east, with a chapel above it where the knights pray facing the Sunmaw. The Water Yard lies outside the walls, a walled yard where caravans water their camels at a price. The Thorn House is the knights' hall, with a single hawthorn in its yard. The Beacon on the north tower is the first of the fire-beacons that can carry a warning to Tinoda in one night.

Life and trade. Water is Cluvedo's only crop. A camel's water and a place in the Water Yard cost a quarter jabirga, the same as a caravanserai's charge in Zarvand, and a Zarvani caravan-master pays it with a Salt Gift as if Cluvedo were one of his own gates. Soldiers and caravan-men trade in the Water Yard in whatever coin comes to hand. Food comes from Tinoda by mule, and the garrison eats bread, chickpeas, olives and salted sardines. White Thorn knights who will fight their first battle on this frontier keep the Thorn Vigil under the one hawthorn, and a knight whose first battle falls in Corenva, when it has no flowers, is pitied.

People. Grand Master Arsoso Tirago lost two fingers of his left hand in a Sunmaw border skirmish in his youth, and Cluvedo says it happened within sight of its walls. The names of the castellan and the knights of the Thorn House are not given.

Hooks. - The Beacon was lit one night in Plune with no enemy in sight, and Tinoda's gates were shut till noon. - Three soldiers deserted to Daalher with the Water Yard's takings, and a caravan-master sent them back with a letter. - If the Fourth Crusade marches overland like the First, it will water here, and the castellan has been asked how many men the Cistern can serve. He knows the answer and dislikes it. - A Castavari envoy passed east through the Desert Gate this spring with a silver chest and an escort that wore no colors.

Camp · Salt Brotherhood · about 3,000 people ashore

No chart shows the way in. A ship bound for Wreckers Cove waits off the reef until a pilot boat comes out and whistles the Reef-Runners' code to the cliffs, and only when the answer comes back is it let into a passage that closes at low tide. Inside, sea cliffs white with petrels curve around a crescent beach, and the Brotherhood's huts, built of driftwood and the timbers of broken prizes, climb the slope above. Off the point the Singing Reef whistles when the wind is in the storm quarter, and at night the land-crabs cover the beach.

At a glance. The cove is the seat of Captain-Queen Sormerva Vex and the council of nine captains, the Brotherhood's base since the Drowning of Vexport in 1004, and the name of Vex's own crew. It is guarded by the reef passages, where no galleon can follow a reef galley. It lives on Castavari ships taken on the Salt Sea Lanes, on captains' ransoms of fifty larrama each, on selling what it takes to the Coastwrights, to the Waheli of Moss Harbor and, by the Long Reach, to Chaiyo, and on agave rope and spirit. Its faith is the Salt-Sworn's. It is known for the Vote on the Tide, and for taking thirty ships and hanging no one. Its direction is RISING, because the Brotherhood grows while Castavar's navy is pulled toward the crusade.

The town. Since 1004 the Brotherhood has never anchored its whole fleet in one place, so the cove holds a few crews at a time. The Tide Steps, cut into the rock at the north end of the beach, are where the Captain-King or Queen is elected at the ebb and sworn at the flood, so that the sea hears both halves of the promise. The Tally House is Chobecho's hall of stores, where the tenth of every prize owed to Two-Fathom's Hold is counted out for food, water and widows. The Captains' Cave is a dry sea-cave where the council sits. On the Careening Beach at the southern end prize coasters are hauled over and re-rigged, and the Agave Terraces climb the slope behind it to the stillhouse.

Life and trade. A prize is split one tenth to Two-Fathom's Hold, one tenth to the council, and the rest by shares, two to a captain and one to every hand. Captured captains hear Zarvani poetry while they wait for their ransom. The cove eats grouper and land-crab and drinks agave spirit, a quarter jabirga a jug when anyone pays. Newcomers throw their Castavari saints' medals into a tide pool at the landing called the Medal Pool, because the sea has no saints and takes offense. The dead are buried at sea, and a thief of shares is left on a waterless island with one jug.

People. Sormerva Vex (39) sails the Ebb and Flood and claims descent from the Captain-King who drowned in 1004. Chobecho "Two-Fathom" (48) keeps the shares and elections with a tally-stick, and stumps about on a foot carved from the bolt that took his own. Lonre of the Long Reach sails east to Chaiyo from here once a year.

Hooks. - Three captains have asked Chobecho to stand against Vex at the next vote on the Tide Steps. - Vex's sealed letter has reached the Bairnaro Drosdo, and the cove is arguing over what a kingdom would cost the Brotherhood. - The three shipwrights missing from Tandosa's Pine Yards are said to be on the Careening Beach, building something the Brotherhood has never had.

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City · Caelvenne · about 35,000 people, more in high summer

The shore road from Solvaine runs east some hundred miles through reed marsh and then villa country, and Ienvaune shows on terraced hills above a curving harbor. The Caelvennois hear ienaune, "vineyard," in the name, and the hills bear it out: vines climb from the water's edge to the ridge, broken by painted villas, tall dark Larvir cypresses and walled gardens. On summer nights fireflies light the terraces and the Ienvaune nightingales sing in the gardens, and every poet in Caelvenne has tried to put it into words. In the morning the city smells of warm bread, butter and honey, because Ienvaune bakes the most famous pastries on the continent.

At a glance. The Conclave rules Ienvaune through the city's old League houses, chief among them the Teuvaun, which hold its wards and keep its watchmen. A landward wall faces the vineyards, and a rebuilt harbor mole shelters its galleys and lake boats. It lives on white wine; on the Nine Houses, who summer here to escape the midges over Solvaine's canals; on pastry; and on the Spice Way, whose caravans come north from Feshfaan and Mazbaaran and pay the gate twentieth at the city's customs. Its faith is the Radiant Iévaine, with the Drowned Court among the harbor fishermen. It is known for Ienvaune white, pastries, nightingales and the Burning of 271. Its direction is STABLE, because old money, good wine and the desert trade have carried it through worse years, though the succession in Zarvand could shut its southern road.

The town. The city climbs in terraces from the harbor to the ridge. The Harbor of the Two Thousand is the old harbor that Claupiose's galleys fired with pitch in 271, killing two thousand. It was rebuilt in stone, and the blackened footings of the first mole still show at low water. The Piosin (piosin, "castle") is the old League citadel on the first terrace, where the houses of the city meet and the customs clerks keep their books. The Mimil (mimil, "pastry") is the street of pastry-cooks below it, whose ovens are lit before the dawn liturgy. The Villa Terraces cover the hills above the city with the summer houses of the Nine Houses. The Feshfaan Gate opens the south road. Beside it is a walled caravan yard where Zarvani caravan-masters unload saffron, pepper and coffee, and a mirror tower on the ridge links Ienvaune to Solvaine and the eastern shore.

Life and trade. The vineyards are tended all year and picked in Caudés, the wine month. The Settling Day on the 1st of Caudés calls the houses back to Solvaine just as the grapes come in, and Ienvaune says the vintage is always the better for it. A vineyard hand earns a flirone a day at the picking, with his food, and eats bread, cheese, onions and watered wine. At the presses Ienvaune white costs three jugs for a flirone, against two in Solvaine, and four pastries from the Mimil cost a flirone. Ienvaune sells wine and gold to Mazbaaran. An ounce of Feshfaan saffron, three leusores in Solvaine, can be had a little cheaper at the Feshfaan Gate by someone who knows the caravan-master.

The grudge with Claupiose is 875 years old. Claupiose houses do not marry Ienvaune houses, and Ienvaune calls the stone on Claupiose's Pitch Stair a boast. On the Night of Mirrors, the 9th of Surmave, Ienvaune sets a mirror and a lamp in every lakeward window like the rest of the shore, except the windows that face west toward Claupiose. Those stay dark.

People. Caelvenne's ambassador in Hethlend sweetens Aldmere's Lord Chancellor Ownirel with Ienvaune pastries. Lenvén the Vintner, head of the house of Teuvaun, hosts the Nine each summer, and the boxes come from a Teuvaun bakery, packed by Voulin the Pastry-Cook, a stout, flour-dusted woman of sixty who keeps the oldest oven in the Mimil and has baked for three princes. Her name means "dear." Prince Durkaad governs the Feshfaan fields at the far end of the south road.

Hooks. - A match has been proposed between a Flurdel son of Claupiose and a Teuvaun daughter, the first since 271, and the Piosin is split over whether to answer it. - The pastry boxes that go to Hethlend weigh more than pastry. Voulin has noticed and has not asked. - Zarvani caravan-masters at the Feshfaan Gate say the next saffron will come under Prince Faasheer's seal or not at all. - The inns on the east road have raised their prices in case the Southdowns longbowmen bound for Larvir come by land instead of by galley.

City · Caelvenne · about 22,000 people

From Solvaine a galley takes three days to Larvir, and a mirror signal takes an hour. The lake narrows at its eastern end, the water turns pale and broken over shallows, and the whole of Lake Surmave begins to run out through a gap into the Tsanha. Those shallows are the Sill, and the crossings over them are the Tsanha fords. Larvir stands on the south bank above them, a walled city of painted stone with a mirror tower on its highest point and a line of dark cypresses along its walls. Mules plod the towpath below. To the east there is nothing but grass to the edge of the sky, and in 1146 there are riders in it.

At a glance. The Conclave rules Larvir through the house that holds it as a ward, and it is Caelvenne's front line against the Grass Sea. A stone wall faces the river and the steppe, the Larvir squadron of war galleys guards the lake up to the Sill, and a Tharaxi company under the Iron Contract camps outside the walls. The city lives on the lake toll of one flirone a ton on foreign hulls, on the gate twentieth, on sturgeon roe, and above all on the Tsanha Crossing, whose caravans and barges set out from here for Tolmar-Buyor, the Jade Gate and Kokrin. Its faith is the Radiant Iévaine, with the Drowned Court among the boatmen and the Road Spirit's coins at every crossroads. It is known as the far end of the first mirror line, as the prize of the War of the Tsanha Fords (911–914), and as the place everyone is watching. Its direction is CONTESTED, because the Iron Contract lapses in 1147, the Cherüsh are at the fords, and Caelvenne has no army of its own to hold them.

The town. The Sill Quay lines the riverbank below the walls, where flat barges are poled over the shallows and war galleys cannot follow. Caelvenne's navy rules the lake and cannot chase an enemy one mile down the river. The Mule Yards stand at the head of the towpath, where Larvir mules are stabled to haul tow-barges back up the Tsanha, fifty-five to sixty days from Kokrin. The Savauze (savauze, "road") is the caravan quarter by the east gate, with the Tsanha Qaflan's letter-house and inns. The Toll Mole shelters the galleys and holds the office where the lake toll is taken from every foreign hull; the Drift has never paid it. On the city's height stands the Larvir Sieran, the eastern end of Sierine Tésvol's first mirror line of 788. Outside the walls lies the Tharaxi Field, where the Contract's spearmen camp.

Life and trade. Larvir trades east and west at once. Glass, medicine, wool cloth, wine and clockwork go out to the steppe and Kaishon; silk, tea, porcelain, lacquer, steppe horses, felt and hides come back. A bolt of Kaishoni plain silk costs two and a half leusores at Larvir and three in Solvaine. A Larvir mule and its driver hire out for a flirone a day on the towpath. A barge takes about two weeks down to the Jade Gate. Tsanha sturgeon roe goes west to the tables of the Nine Houses, and ford carp feed everyone else. All Larvir argues over who will hold the walls in 1147. Every dawn the mirror tower flashes the night's count of riders at the fords to Solvaine, and the Solvaine price sheets move on the number.

People. A company of Southdowns longbowmen under Dunt Wrunvos, loaned by Aldmere under the Grain Compact, is expected to share Larvir's walls with the Tharaxi, and neither side has been told of the other. Tilove the Tower-Keeper keeps the Larvir Sieran, a thin gray man of fifty-five whose family has kept the tower since the Tésvol built it. His name means "wise." Across the border, Aldmere's castellan of Lulstat watches the same riders every dawn.

Hooks. - The Southdowns company arrives to find the Tharaxi already on the walls, and they share one stew pot. - Caelvenne's envoy has offered Tharax double the Contract's gold if its spears will garrison the fords. - Tilove's dawn count and the Lulstat castellan's count differ by three hundred riders, and someone is changing one of them. - A Farisel factor paid a large sum through the Savauze letter-house to a rider in felt, and a Ledger clerk wrote it down. - When the Contract lapses, Caelvenne means to hold one wall here with five peoples who despise one another.

Town · Caelvenne · about 3,000 people

A few days south of Solvaine by the villa roads, where the reed marsh gives way to low hills and vineyards, a painted villa stands on a knoll among cypresses with a small town grown up at its gate. The town takes its name from it: ionjale is Caelvennois for villa, and this one belongs to the House of Farisel. Over its gate hangs a plain copper kettle, the house's sign. The town below is painted rose and ocher, with a small church whose altar mirror catches the morning sun, but most of its people cannot read the signs on their own walls.

At a glance. Ionjale Farisel is a ward of the House of Farisel, which pays its watchmen and settles its quarrels in the villa's counting-room. It has no wall but the villa's garden wall. It lives on its vineyards and on the villa, where the house keeps its closed ledgers going back to 903, a copying room of clerks, and the couriers who carry its papers to Solvaine before each Settling Day. Its faith is the Radiant Iévaine, with the Ledger among the clerks. As everywhere in the Caelvennois countryside, fewer than two in ten can read. It is known as the place where Farisel keeps its memory. Its direction is STABLE, though its fortunes now hang on whether Castavar pays on the Settling Day of Caudés.

The town. The Villa is a long painted house around a courtyard, its chief rooms facing east so the dawn can witness the day's first signature. The Book House behind it is a cool stone archive where every closed Farisel ledger since Vailine Farisel's first loan from her kettle is shelved by year. In the Widows' Garden below the terrace each head of the house has planted a villa rose, and Vailine's is the oldest. Clerks' Row is the street of narrow houses where the copyists lodge, and the Vine Street runs down to the church and the town's one inn.

Life and trade. Most of the town works the vines or serves the villa. A vineyard hand earns a flirone a day at harvest, a copying clerk two, and a Ledger-following bookkeeper three, because he does not steal. A bed and supper at the inn cost a flirone. On Kettle Night, while the Nine Houses count their books by candlelight in Solvaine, the Book House clerks count the old ledgers in silence at the same hour. The town can tell a good quarter from a bad one by how fast the couriers ride before a Settling Day.

People. Bevele Bansine Farisel (49), head of the house, holds the debts of Aldmere, Castavar and Clan Stormbrand, and has cut off Castavar's credit this year; her late husband was a Gatekeeper of the Drowned Court. Vailine Farisel, who founded the house in 903, is remembered in the Widows' Garden and in the bankers' toast, "to the kettle."

Hooks. - The daughter of the dead Kettle House clerk has been seen in Clerks' Row, and his ledger of deeds is still missing. - The Book House has been told to reckon what Farisel loses if Castavar defaults on the 1st of Caudés, and the figure has not left the villa. - If Bansine Farisel ever calls in every debt on the continent at once, the letters will be copied here.

Fortress · Caelvenne · about 1,500 people

The east road from Ienvaune climbs out of the last vineyards, and the cypresses stop. Ahead the land rolls away in feather-grass, silver and moving, to the edge of the sky. Pioclaure stands on the last rise before it, a square Caelvennois fortress of pale stone with a painted gate and a mirror tower on its keep, facing the Grass Sea. Below its walls, in rows of tents with no ornament at all, camp the men who truly defend it. They are Tharaxi.

At a glance. A castellan named by the Conclave commands a small garrison of Caelvennois crossbowmen with clockwork crossbows, but the fortress's real strength is a Tharaxi company under the Iron Contract, camped outside the walls as the Contract requires. Its curtain walls are strong and seldom tried. It lives on the Conclave's pay and the traffic of the road from Ienvaune to Larvir. Its faith is the Radiant Iévaine inside the walls and Kharnoth in the tents. It is known as the fortress of hired spears, since the principality's own army is small. Its direction is FADING, because when the Iron Contract lapses in 1147 its best soldiers will march home.

The town. The Keep holds the castellan's hall, the armory of clockwork crossbows, and the mirror tower that passes signals between Ienvaune and Larvir. The Tharaxi Camp lies below the east wall in straight lines of tents, with a mess-tent at their center where a chair stands empty for Kharnoth. The Stores under the south wall hold Aldmere grain for the garrison. The Grass Gate faces the steppe. Pioclaure village, outside the west gate, sells bread, wine and boots to both garrisons.

Life and trade. A hired soldier in Caelvenne earns two or three flirones a day. The Tharaxi earn nothing, because their gold goes to the Gold House in Tharxa, and they eat as they would at home, in silence, from their own mess. Bread is ten loaves for a flirone and Ienvaune white two jugs for a flirone, notched on the villagers' tally-sticks and settled in whole flirones at the week's end. The Caelvennois of the garrison race horses on the grass; the Tharaxi run. On the Three Days of Xert the Tharaxi camp keeps silence at meals and speaks the names of the dead of the Gap, and the Caelvennois garrison has learned to keep its own voices down those three days as well.

People. No one of great name lives at Pioclaure. Roltien Aijal's Quiet Office keeps a man in the village, and the castellan knows which one.

Hooks. - The Tharaxi company has begun mending boots and oiling shield-straps, though no one has ordered it to march. - The castellan has written to the Conclave asking who will man the walls in 1147, and the answer was a list of peoples. - The mirror tower has twice flashed a sighting of Cherüsh riders on the grass south of Larvir, farther west than any have come before.

Camp · Cherüsh Horde · about 15,000 people, more in spring

A few days' ride down the Tsanha from Larvir, the willows thicken where the river spreads over gravel into fords. On a low rise beside them stand broken walls of old gray stone, and around and over them spreads a city of felt: thousands of round tents, dung-fire smoke, horse herds to the edge of the sky, and barges moored at the ford. The air smells of steppe wormwood, horses and mutton fat. This is Tolmar-Buyor, pitched in 1141 on the ruins of Tontanor, and in the middle of the ruins, against every warning, men are laying new stones.

At a glance. Sarsak Tolmar, olriq of the united Cherüsh, rules the camp, and his mother Ghorsan runs it, keeping its herds, marriages and grudges. It has no walls but the ruins and the stones Sarsak is laying. It lives on its herds, on Kaishon's yearly tribute, on the passage gift taken from every caravan of the Tsanha Crossing, and on horses, a steppe horse being worth a crown on the Grass Sea. Its faith is the Wide Blue, and the Blue Riders under Bagoq the shaman answer to the sky before the Tolmar. It is known as the seat of the most dangerous man on Aethorra. Its direction is RISING, because the Horde has never held together this long, and the east road now runs past the Tolmar's tent door.

The town. The Ruins of Shaghis the Gray's capital, abandoned in 502, held only the Stone-Sitters and the Tontanor thistle for six hundred years, and the hermits now have a camp among them. The Library Tent, which the riders call the Library to mock it, holds Sarsak's books and the captured primer from which he is teaching himself Kaishoni script. Shaghis's Stones are the new courses he is laying where, in the tale, Shaghis sat dead against his wall. The Moats, the old ditches of Tontanor, are standing water. Bagoq says any olriq who builds walls here will die, and the fever the water breeds agrees with him. At the Tribute Ground by the ford the Kaishoni tribute caravan unloads each spring, and the barge-town of Ford's End lies moored beside it.

Life and trade. The camp eats mutton from fat-tailed sheep and wild onion eaten raw, and every rider owns ten horses. Since 1141 each caravan has paid a passage gift of one bolt in twenty or a balaal a beast, whichever the rider asks, and the Tsanha Qaflan are haggling over next year's. Kaishon's tribute is worth about 100,000 leusores a year in silver, silk and tea. At the Bloom, in the Second Month, each tribe frees a horse promised to the sky, and 1146 is a black-horse year, which is unlucky.

People. Sarsak Tolmar (27) wears a Kaishoni silk sash and wants a kingdom with walls and libraries. Ghorsan (44) is missing the last joint of both little fingers. Bagoq the Elder (60) blessed the joining of the tribes and could unbless it. Juryan Redbow (19), of the Shusa, wants to burn Kokrin. Some of the Tontanor Ghosts are answering Sarsak's call to come home.

Hooks. - Juryan Redbow has been seen near the Library Tent with a torch and no reason to carry one. - Bagoq has declared the ruins cursed, and Ghorsan must choose between her son and the sky. - The tribute caravan is due, and Sarsak means to send the silver back with a letter asking for an open gate.

Barge-towns · The Drift · about 8,000 people in all · no fixed place on the map

From the bank a barge-town looks at first like a pile-up of boats. Twenty or forty barges lie lashed together side by side and end to end, with planks laid between them for streets, washing strung from mast to mast, goats on the deckhouse roofs, and the smoke of cooking fires hanging over all. Children dive off the outer hulls. The town drifts with the current at walking pace, and a ferry-boat puts out toward anyone on the bank who waves. By the Drift's founding tale the river gave a drowning man a plank on condition that he never touch the bank again, so every Drift child is taught that the town is the world and the bank is somewhere else.

At a glance. Each barge-town elects a Helm, and the nine Helms meet in the Helms' Moot at the Wenvorm mouth on New Year's Day, when each has a new river-fish tattooed on the arm. No barge-town has walls; any of them can unlash and scatter in an hour when the customs boats come. They live on ferrying, on carrying cargo for about two thirds of what an Aldmeri bargeman charges, on fish and eels, and on smuggling what pays. They have never paid a tax to anyone. Their faith is the river's own spirits, and on the lake the Drowned Court's knotted cords. They are known for the Water Name, the fish tattoos, and the fact that none of them has ever paid the chain toll, the lake toll or the Lake Gate twentieth. Its direction is STABLE for the Drift as a whole, though each town goes its own way. The nine towns hold only about two thousand people lashed together at any one time. The rest of the Drift's eight thousand work loose barges, ferry-boats and fishing skiffs that belong to one town or another and tie on to it for the winter and the Moot.

The towns.

Threeoars

The great barge-town of the Drift carries about four hundred people on the Wenvorm under Helm Rindlith, who is fifty, barrel-shaped, sun-brown, and tattooed with river-fish from wrist to shoulder, one for every year of her life on the water. Its stern barge still carries the three great steering sweeps it is named for, and it takes a crew of twelve on each to swing the town into a new channel. For thirty years Threeoars has drifted between Aldmere and Caelvenne and paid taxes to neither, smuggling what pays and ferrying what doesn't. It ties up at Hethlend's Swan Quays and Wromthalm's Darthir, and lately it has been seen moored off Claupiose's Rèvascare at night with no lamps lit. Its runner is Pell, fifteen, who can swim the Wenvorm in flood, pick a lock underwater, and name every quay-master on the river who takes bribes. Pell wants to see the sea. The town tells the tale of Helm Rindlith's Eel, which she wrestled and lost and has been trying to catch ever since; the eel is the river's own and will not be caught. Rindlith is generous, superstitious and foul-tempered before noon, and her people know to ask for favors after lunch. Bound runaways who reach the Wenvorm know that Threeoars asks no questions. Its direction is CONTESTED, because a town that has never had a law may soon have to decide whether it has one.

Seven Ropes

Seven Ropes is the Drift's ferry town, about two hundred people on the lower Wenvorm. It keeps seven ferry-ropes, heavy cables its boats string across the river at crossings where the crown has built no bridge, and it moves from crossing to crossing with the seasons, following the drovers and the harvest carts. A cart crosses for an eighth of a mark, cheaper than any toll. Aldmere's reeves complain that Seven Ropes takes the crown's traffic, and the drovers complain when it is not there. Its Helm reads the Water Name of more children than any other, because the ferry families marry into the villages on both banks and bring their babies back aboard to be named. A Seven Ropes ferryman never takes the same fare from both sides of a quarrel. Its direction is STABLE.

The Mill Reach

The Mill Reach holds about a hundred and fifty people on the middle Wenvorm, and its barges carry floating mills: water-wheels hung between paired hulls and turned by the current. It moors off river villages and grinds their grain for less than the lord's mill charges, and it is busiest in Halshul, the Aldmeri mill month that follows Harvest Home. The lords' millers hate it and have asked the crown to forbid any mill that cannot be taxed, which is every mill on the Mill Reach. Its people are the Drift's carpenters and wheelwrights, and every other barge-town sends them its broken rudders and sprung planks. A miller's barge is the most valuable hull on the river, and the Mill Reach never unlashes it, even when the customs boats come. Its direction is FADING, because the lords are winning in the shire courts.

The Lantern

The Lantern holds about a hundred people on the last reach of the Wenvorm, where it runs into the lake below Wromthalm. It is named for the lamps it keeps burning on its masts through fog and darkness, so that barges coming down can find the river mouth when the earl's bell at Wromthalm cannot be heard. Grain barges pay it in bread and cloth for the light. The Lantern hosts the Helms' Moot each New Year's Day, when the other eight towns come to it at the Wenvorm mouth. It has nothing to do with the Lantern Road, the troupe of players, though the players, like everyone else, come aboard to perform in the week after the Moot. In a hard fog the Lantern's people take turns at the lamps all night, and no Helm of the Lantern has ever let one go dark. Its direction is STABLE.

Slowwater

Slowwater holds about a hundred and twenty people on the Nollen, the slow river that runs northeast past Nolsomel to the lake near Wromthalm, and it is named for that river. The Nollen runs low in late summer, and Slowwater spends those weeks aground on its sandbars, which its people insist are not land, since the barges never leave the river. It carries Nolsomel timber and beech-wood down to the lake in small barges, with Nollen pike packed in reeds, and brings back salt. It trades its ferrying for grain in the villages along the banks, and the Nolsomel poachers who take the royal deer are said to know its moorings well. Its Helm is always its oldest pilot, because only the oldest remember where the bars lay last year. Its direction is STABLE.

Mudbank

Mudbank is the smallest and poorest of the nine, about eighty people in a few old barges that work the reed shallows where the Nollen enters the lake. Mudbank lives on eels, cut reed, and the few travelers who need to cross where no one else will go, and it trades eels for bread with the reed-cutters of the lakeshore marshes. Its barges are more patched than built, and it borrows planks from the Mill Reach against next year's eels. At the Helms' Moot its Helm is the one the others lend to, and the one who votes last. Mudbank's children leave for the bigger towns and few come back, but every one of them keeps the river name Mudbank's Helm read for them. Its direction is FADING.

Surmave Float

Surmave Float is the one barge-town that lives on Lake Surmave itself, and it holds about three hundred people. Out on the open lake the Drowned Court's customs run strong: every bow carries a knotted cord, no one swims at night, and some of its families give their dead to the lake at the new moon with a cord tied at the ankle. Surmave Float carries whatever the customs boats miss through the reed channels south of Solvaine's Reedside, coffee, pelts and Castavari silver among it. When the lake closes in winter and the galleys go into the sheds of the Yards, it lies up in the delta reeds. After the Helms' Moot, cargo on the lake is cheap for a week, because Surmave Float has just settled its prices with the river towns. Its direction is RISING, because Caelvenne's customs boats are stretched thin and the lake is rising.

Tsanha-Drift

Tsanha-Drift holds about three hundred and fifty people on the Tsanha and carries the river half of the Tsanha Crossing. It crosses the Sill at Larvir, drifts past the Tontanor fords and the Jade Gate, about two weeks to the Gate, and winters at Yomìn in Kokrin, where the Drift's barges tie up for the cold months. It comes back upstream behind Larvir mules on the towpath, fifty-five to sixty days of plodding. Kaishon hangs a few smugglers every year for carrying Tsenkin silkworm eggs west in rice sacks on Drift barges, and Tsanha-Drift says it never carries them, which is what it would say. In 1146 Cherüsh riders watch it pass from both banks. Its direction is CONTESTED, because whoever holds the fords will set its price.

Ford's End

Ford's End, about two hundred and fifty people, has lain moored at the Tontanor fords beside Tolmar-Buyor under Cherüsh protection since 1141. It is the only barge-town that no longer drifts, and at every Moot the other Helms argue whether a town that does not move is still the Drift. Its bargemen trade in Tsanha sturgeon and ford carp and carry across the river whatever the Horde and the Crossing's caravans want carried, from Kaishoni silk to Cherüsh horses. Riders water their herds beside its hulls, and its children learn Cherüsh before they learn to pole a barge. That protection has made Ford's End either the richest barge-town on the rivers or the first hostage, depending on whom you ask. Its direction is CONTESTED.

Life and trade. The Drift pays no wages; what a town earns, the town eats. Its people eat fish and eels, bread bought on the bank, and whatever the cargo can spare. A child is named twice, once by its parents and once by the river, which the Helm reads from the first ripple the child makes. The worst punishment a Helm can give is to put someone ashore. The Drift gives its dead to the river. Its people never sleep with their feet toward the current, and a barge that turns upstream on its own is telling its crew to go home.

People. Helm Rindlith of Threeoars (50) and Pell (15) are the two of the Drift whose names are known off the water. The other eight Helms go unnamed here.

Hooks. - Threeoars drifts into Caelvennois water on the day the Iron Contract lapses and is boarded by Lilies hunting Tharaxi deserters, while three Bound runaways hide aboard. - Pell has been asking Tsanha-Drift's bargemen how far the river runs past the Jade Gate. - Drift bargemen of the Drowned Court have offered to carry a column of Bound runaways east by night. - The Drownings say the lake stands a hand higher than at New Year, and Surmave Float has moved its winter mooring farther into the reeds.

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City · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Meemakh of Kebidaan · about 60,000 people

The road west from Mazbaaran leaves the green of the Talodin behind and climbs eleven days through brown hills. Kebidaan shows at the end of it, in a valley under the last spur of the Spine: gray-green pistachio orchards in rows up every slope, a mud-brick wall, and a skyline of low domes. Travelers soon mark the smoke. The fire-temple of the Flame sends up one plume. The Two-Fire House sends up two, one thick and one thin as a thread, from a hearth banked to embers. At the Mazbaaran Gate the caravans hand over their Salt Gift while cold water runs under the road in a salest channel from the hills.

At a glance. The Jaarzeb of Kebidaan governs the city and the western meemakh from his palace. He keeps his own troops on the walls, takes one part in twenty at the gates, and sends half the land fifth to Mazbaaran. He follows the Shadowed, and perhaps one Kebidaani in three keeps two fires with him; the rest keep the Faith of the Eternal Flame, and the Rahaasheem of the city's fire-temple have forgiven neither. Kebidaan lives on pistachios; on the western Spice Way, which brings Castavari red and silver up from Daalher and sends them on to Mazbaaran; and on its merchant houses. It is known for its orchards, for the Long Drought, and for Grand Vizier Tartal-i Kebidaan, who was born here. It stands with Prince Durkaad's Garden party. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. Kebidaan lies across the mouth of its valley, where the salestoot come out of the hills. It hangs on the Spine's snow more nakedly than any city on the Talodin, which is why the Long Drought of 330–338 struck it hardest. Half the city starved or fled. The southern third of the old walled town was never settled again, and its lanes are now the Drought Orchards, pistachio trees planted in rows over house footings inside the wall. Children dig up doorsteps and cooking pots among the roots. The Two-Fire House stands in the middle of the living city, the largest Shadowed temple in Zarvand, its bright fire under one dome and its banked fire under the other. Its doors are never shut at night, because the Shadowed owe mercy by night as they owe candor by day. Uphill the Jaarzeb's palace keeps a walled garden called Kebid-Doosaan ("dark garden"), laid out like every Zarvani garden with four channels and a pool, but planted to be walked by lamplight. Abacus Lane, below the market, is the street of counting-houses where the Grand Vizier's family traded, and their house still keeps its old sign. The Hill Stair at the top of the city is the stepped cistern where the salestoot empty. The salest-diggers keep the water-hours there, and they say the channels have run lower three summers now.

Life and trade. The year turns on the pistachio harvest in Khaavaruq, the Seventh Month, when families spread cloths under the trees and beat the branches with poles. The hulls stain hands brown for weeks, and nuts dry on every roof in the city. A pound of shelled pistachios costs a quarter balaal in the market, and a day's labor earns about one balaal, as in Mazbaaran. Kebidaanis eat flatbread, dates brought from the Talodin, mutton, pistachios in everything, and on feast days a sweet paste of pistachio and date. They argue about water, and about Prince Faasheer, who has promised the Rahaasheem he will burn the two-fire temples when he is crowned. On the Night of the Flame, the 6th of Kelong, many families keep two watches: half the night at the fire-temple and half at the Two-Fire House, where the banked fire is fed one coal at a time until dawn. People here pinch out candles rather than blow them, and even the Rahaasheem's servants do it. Girls are told "Tartal's Abacus," and every year the tale gains a new verse.

People. Grand Vizier Tartal-i Kebidaan (54) was born here into a merchant family and still takes her name from the city. The Jaarzeb of Kebidaan follows the Shadowed and has marked Faasheer's promise. Zarrit the Money-Changer of Mazbaaran's Saffron Gate is Kebidaan-born. Mazbar the Speaker (mazbar, "wise") is the speaking Twinkeeper of the Two-Fire House, a heavy, cheerful man of about fifty whose partner has not said a word in the thirty years they have served together. Mazbar has begun teaching the Twinkeepers' rite to the young, in case he must be replaced quickly.

Hooks. - Word runs that Faasheer means to send a column to burn the Shadowed temples, and that the Jaarzeb would shut his gates and ask Prince Durkaad for help. - A Qaflan widow carries a letter setting out Faasheer's plans for Kebidaan. Someone in the city is paying to learn what it says. - The Hill Stair's water is falling as fast as Mazbaaran's Cold Stair. Old women in the Drought Orchards say the ground already remembers what comes next. - This year's new verse of "Tartal's Abacus" has the merchant's daughter counting seven princes and getting a different answer each time. The Rahaasheem want it stopped.

City · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Meemakh of Feshfaan · about 45,000 people

In Feshfan, the Eighth Month, you smell Feshfaan before you see it. The plain around the city turns purple with saffron flowers for three weeks, and at dawn every field is bent over with pickers. Their baskets go by donkey to the roasting-sheds, and the warm, bitter-sweet smell of drying threads hangs over the road for miles. The city is newer than it looks. Its walls are fired brick, its domes tiled a paler blue than Mazbaaran's, and only one stretch of wall on the north side is black. That is what the city kept of the fire of 398.

At a glance. Prince Durkaad, the Khaasar's favorite son, has governed the city and the meemakh since 1145, when his eldest brother took the Unfading and sent him here out of the way. His household troops and the meemakh's garrison hold the walls. Feshfaan lives on saffron, the dearest spice in the world, and on the crossroads of the Spice Way, where pepper coming up from Baamarsh meets saffron going to Mazbaaran and to Caelvenne's Ienvaune. It keeps the Faith of the Eternal Flame and follows the Celestial Table more than any city outside Mazbaaran. It is the seat of the Garden party, and the place the Unfading would have to come to arrest the prince. Direction: RISING.

The town. Feshfaan sits on a dry plain eleven days east-northeast of Mazbaaran and about two weeks' ride south of Ienvaune. Its roads leave by four gates: to Mazbaaran, to Ienvaune, and south to Vonteen-Shorooq and Baamarsh. The Burned Wall is a long stretch of the old north wall, black still from the night in 398 when Khaasar Avisteer I blamed the Jaarzeb of Feshfaan for his father's poisoning and burned the city. It has never been refaced, and every child of Feshfaan is walked along it once. The Weighing House by the south gate is where every ounce of saffron is weighed, sealed and taxed before it leaves the meemakh; its clerks swear their scales on the Flame each spring. The Governor's House is the old Jaarzeb's palace. There Durkaad has built a sighting-wall on the roof like those on the Star Tower, and spends his nights on it with two astronomers. Outside the walls lie the fields called Dolest-Feshfan ("saffron field"), watered by salestoot, and the Crossroads Caravanserai, a great square yard where Nhal pepper and Feshfaan saffron change hands under guard.

Life and trade. Saffron is picked by hand, three threads to a flower, and it takes a field of flowers to make a pound. Pickers earn about three quarters of a balaal a day and their food at harvest, and the threads sell for a talod an ounce at the Weighing House. The same ounce fetches two talod in Mazbaaran and three leusores in Solvaine. Even poor houses eat saffron grain on feast days, because the pickers keep the broken threads. Young men wear a thread of yellow silk on the left sleeve after the stain on Durkaad's. The harvest ends with the Last Basket, a feast of the town at which the final basket of flowers is carried to the Governor's House, and this year the prince carried it himself. People argue whether the Unfading will come, and about the pepper caravans, which now bring as much news as pepper.

People. Prince Durkaad (33), fourth son, scholar and poet, has a gap between his front teeth, saffron on his sleeve, and three Jaarzebeem behind him. Veelbat the Dyer of Mazbaaran dyes the robes of his household. Mozaaft of the Deep Sands believes he can sell Durkaad the secret of the Castavari envoy in the Cinder Teeth for a title. Fakhzin the Weigher (fakhzin, "yellow") is chief clerk of the Weighing House, a thin woman of about forty who can tell a false ounce by its smell, and has begun weighing the letters that come through the Crossroads Caravanserai as carefully as the saffron.

Hooks. - A captain of the Unfading, it is said, will be ordered to arrest Durkaad at Feshfaan, and will ride out with ten thousand men and one question. - A pepper caravan from Baamarsh has brought word that the Jaarzeb of Baamarsh has written to Faasheer. Fakhzin has seen the seal and has not decided whom to tell. - Durkaad's astronomers have been measuring something on the roof every night since spring and will not say what. - The Burned Wall has a new crack. Some in the city call it an omen, and Durkaad has had masons look at it.

City · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Meemakh of Baamarsh · about 30,000 people

Baamarsh is the only Zarvani city that smells of the sea. The road from Vonteen-Shorooq crosses two hundred and forty miles of salt scrub and comes over a last rise to a gray-green bay, a brick harbor wall, a squat fortress on the point, and a row of long black boats drawn up under sheds. North of the town the land climbs toward the Cinder Teeth, far out of sight, and to the east begins the dark edge of the jungle. The gate-keeper takes the Salt Gift like any other, and in the fever months he also asks whether you have come from the Nhal.

At a glance. The Jaarzeb of Baamarsh governs the city and the easternmost meemakh and commands its fire-boats. He is counted among the southern Jaarzebeem who stand with Faasheer's Citadel party. The harbor is guarded by Faashab-Baamar ("sea fortress") and about twenty fire-boats with bronze siphons for Talodin fire, and the land side by a brick wall. Baamarsh lives on Nhal pepper, on the coasters that fetch it, on salt, and on being the Khaasarate's door to the naphtha of the Hizkari and the spice-forts on the Nhal. Its faiths are the Flame, the Berrode of about two thousand Converts, and the Sun and Serpent of the jungle border villages. Castavar has come at Zarvand through it twice, and may again. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. The city curves around its bay with the fortress on the western point. The fire-boat sheds run along the harbor under the fortress walls. There Tolaarz of the Fire-Boats drills his crews every Kelong, and the naphtha is kept in jars in a vaulted store cut into the rock. The Pepper Quay on the east side is where the coasters (nekoz) unload pepper from the Nhal delta and load Shorooq salt. Behind it, walled off from the rest of the town, lies the Converts' Quarter, where some two thousand Berrode Zarvani, turned by the missionaries of 690 and those who came after, keep a plain chapel and hold services without music on Fojiga, Castavar's silent day. On the beach below the fortress a line of black stones marks the Burnt Keel, where the Zarvani burned the missionaries' ship in 690. Children are told the stones are its ribs.

Life and trade. Pepper costs a quarter balaal a pound at the spice-forts and three eighths of a balaal on the Pepper Quay. A fire-boat hand earns a balaal a day and a siphon man two, paid on Kelong. People eat fish, flatbread, dates brought down from the valley, and anything with pepper in it. They argue about the Converts, the crusade and the fever. The jungle fever comes up the coast from the Nhal in the wet months, and every family has lost someone to it. Bitter-bark from the Tzalan is the only cure, and it passes through the spice-forts in small, dear lots. The fire-boat drill on Kelong is the city's weekly show: the crews row out, fire one siphon at a raft moored in the bay, and the town watches it burn on the water. Every Night of the Flame the Jaarzeb lights a naphtha fire on the fortress wall, where the Converts' Quarter can see it.

People. Tolaarz of the Fire-Boats (about 60) is the siphon-master. The Jaarzeb of Baamarsh holds the fire-boats and the Citadel's hopes on this coast. Paanaz the Elder (paanaz, "peace") is the eldest woman of the Converts' Quarter, a widow of about seventy, born in the Quarter, who speaks Castavari to the envoys who bring the gold and Zarvani to everyone else. She has quietly sent three families to the Cinder Teeth this year.

Hooks. - Castavar's Pine Yards are building transports, and the Fourth Crusade may come by sea to Baamarsh as the Second did. Captain Tandosno has refused in writing to carry it. - The old women fear the jungle fever will break out along the Nhal into Baamarsh and ride the caravans north. - The Rahaasheem and the Converts are a feud everyone expects to end in a massacre. The Converts' gold is late this year, and some in the Quarter are asking why. - If the Hizkari sell naphtha to Castavar, the fire-boats stop being the one thing a crusade fleet cannot sail past. Tolaarz has begun counting his jars twice.

City · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Meemakh of Shorooq · about 20,000 people

Most people come to Vonteen-Shorooq by water. The flat barges come down the Talodin from Mazbaaran in ten or twelve days, slide out onto the pale green shallows of Lake Shorooq, and pole east along the shore. The city rises on the lake's north shore in white terraces, with the summer palace (vonteen) at the top, its domes and wind towers catching the lake breeze. Below the city, every way you look, the flats are pink with flamingos. At dusk the striped hyenas laugh along the shore, and boatmen will not start a crossing until they stop.

At a glance. The Jaarzeb of Shorooq governs the city and the salt province from a house below the palace, and the Khaasar's household keeps the palace itself. A brick wall, rebuilt after 868, closes the landward side, and the lake closes the rest. Vonteen-Shorooq lives on the Khaasar's summers, on salt, on the red dye of the brine shrimp, and on its crossroads, where the road from Mazbaaran through Kumirekh and the Oasis of Durkis meets the road from Feshfaan to Baamarsh. It keeps the Faith of the Eternal Flame. It is known for the summer palace, the flamingos and the Battle of the Salt Pans. Avisteer III has not come here since his health failed in 1145. Direction: FADING.

The town. The Summer Palace crowns the top terrace: courts of white plaster, pools fed by salestoot from the north, and a long gallery facing the lake where Avisteer III wrote much of his verse. The household sweeps it daily and keeps it ready for a Khaasar who is not coming. Below it the town steps down to the Barge Landing, a stone quay where the river barges tie up. East of the landing lie the dye-works, long shallow vats where brine shrimp raked from the lake are crushed and steeped, and the gutters run red as they do in Mazbaaran's Mulberry Quarter. On the city's western edge stands the Crusaders' Field, a walled ground where the Castavari who held the city from 866 to 868 are buried. Nobody tends it, and nobody may plow it.

Life and trade. Salt is the Khaasar's, and the Salt Pans on the lake's far shore are his. Salt-workers cut slabs, cart them round the lake, and sell them at the landing. A slab the length of a forearm sells for about a balaal here and buys a whole sheep from the Kumir in the Deep Sands. The Salt-Walkers, one of the six tents of the Deep Sands Nomads, cross the flats where no cart can go and trade salt at the city's edge for dates and cloth. People eat lake fish, dates, mutton, and flamingo by the Khaasar's leave only, which he has never given. They argue about the lake. It shrank to a salt pan in the Long Drought, and the shoreline stones show how far it has fallen since 1137. The city's great day is the end of the Walking of the Talodin, late in Khuhor, the Second Month, when the girl who set out from Faashab-Talodin on the 1st reaches the lake. The Jaarzeb's household and half the city go out by boat to meet her at the river mouth and bring her to the landing, where she greets the lake. Every year, at dawn on the day of the Battle of the Salt Pans, old horsemen ride out onto the crust.

People. Khaasar Avisteer III (67) wrote here every summer for forty years and has not come since 1145. The girl of the Walking ends her walk here each spring. Castavar's King Mairo II was taken on the Salt Pans in 868 and ransomed for his weight in silver, and the palace shows visitors the gallery where he waited.

Hooks. - The boatmen say the Talodin may yet run at half its depth, and that if Lake Shorooq goes to salt, this city goes with it. - The household has been told to ready the palace for a guest who is not the Khaasar. Nobody knows which prince. - The Salt-Walkers say the crust on the flats is thicker this year, thick enough for horses again. The Jaarzeb has passed that on to Mazbaaran. - A Castavari pilgrim has asked to pray at the Crusaders' Field. The Rahaasheem want him refused, and the Jaarzeb wants to know who sent him.

City · Tzalan · about 20,000 people

Travelers are not meant to reach Sutzam, since Sun-Speaker Ixatl shut the jungle to outsiders in 1142. Those who come anyway come up the Nhal by kapok canoe, through afternoon rain and past caimans lying in the brown shallows. The first they see of the city is the pyramid. It rises over the canopy on the river's western bank: stepped, black, smooth-edged as cut glass where the vines have been stripped away, and green with maize on every terrace. At dawn the howlers roar from the forest around it, and the Tzalan say the pyramid is calling.

At a glance. Sun-Speaker Ixatl rules Sutzam as priest-king, and from it the deep-jungle peoples he is binding together by faith, marriage and a few disappearances. The city has no wall. The jungle, the river and the Canopy Folk's blowguns defend it, and the Tzalan fight with darts tipped in dart-frog poison and blades of obsidian. It lives on maize, tapir, fish, cacao and pepper. Its faith is the Sun and Serpent, and its priests come from the Serpent Clans of the southern ruins. It is known for the great pyramid, the Opening of the Rains, and the shutting of the jungle. Direction: RISING.

The town. Sutzam was founded in 815 around the largest step-pyramid in the Verdant Deep, the first jungle settlement big enough to be called a city since the Age of Ruins. The Great Pyramid was not built by the Tzalan. Like every step-pyramid in the Deep it is Builder work of black cast stone, made more than three thousand years ago for watching the sun and stars, and its stairs face the sunrise on the longest day. The Tzalan say the First Sun built it for his children. Maize grows on its terraces and sun-orchids in its joints, and Ixatl preaches in the halls inside it from the carved glyphs on their walls. The Speaker's Plaza at its foot is where the city gathers to hear him. No house in Sutzam faces the pyramid, because whoever sleeps facing it takes in the First Sun's dreams. The houses stand in rings on stilts and platforms, their doors turned outward to the forest. East of the plaza is the Ball Court, a long walled alley of cleared earth where teams play with a ball of Nhal rubber. The Feather House holds the sun-quetzal feathers of every child named in the city, each kept until its owner's death and then burned; Kaltzi's is in Ixatl's keeping there. On the river the River Steps run down to the canoe landings, and past them the leaf-cutter gardens, cleared plots laid out after the fungus-gardens of the leaf-cutter ants, feed the city.

Life and trade. Rain falls every afternoon in satzi, the rain-season, and the year (tzàyoka) begins with the first of it. Sutzamis eat maize, tapir and peccary, river turtles' eggs, serpent-fish from the Nhal, and cacao drunk bitter with chili. Hairless Sutzam dogs sleep by the hearths for warmth and are eaten on feast days. Nobody uses coin. Since the jungle was shut, outside goods reach the city only through the river villages: a slab of Shorooq salt buys a basket of cacao beans, and an iron knife a pair of tapir hides. Obsidian comes from the Cinder Teeth by the same road, and the Tzalan get it cheaper than anyone. People argue about the garrisons, about Chelpan, and about whether Ixatl can read the glyphs. Craftsmen set morpho wings into mosaics, and killing a sun-quetzal is death. The great day of the year is the Opening of the Rains: when the first rain falls, the Sun-Speaker climbs the Great Pyramid and names the new year. In 1146 it was the 332nd year of Sutzam. Feast days follow at the turn of each season, and whenever the Sun-Speaker declares them.

People. Sun-Speaker Ixatl (35), slight and fierce, wears jaguar-scars raked across both cheeks and a crown of sun-quetzal feathers. Kaltzi (16), his ward, is the best blowgun in Sutzam. She has killed three Kaishoni sentries from the canopy, and Ixatl calls her the Sun's arrow. The priesthood comes from the Serpent Clans, about eight thousand pyramid-dwellers of the older ruins a hundred and thirty miles to the southeast, who can read about a dozen of the glyphs as ornament and think Ixatl is their tool. Chelpan of the river villages distrusts Ixatl's fire and trades on the river below.

Hooks. - It is whispered that Chelpan has brought a Zarvani scholar of the Celestial Table into the jungle in secret. The scholar is comparing the glyphs to Kaishon's Measures and is on the right track, and what they say is not what Ixatl preaches. - The pyramid's sight-lines point at stars that no longer rise where they did. A careful astronomer could use them to prove how old the pyramid is, and that the First Sun's children did not build it. - The river says Ixatl's warriors mean to burn a Kaishoni logging garrison and send the heads down the Nhal on rafts. - Ixatl has sent envoys to the Bitter-Bark Keepers three times this year. Each time they came back with a gift of bark and no answer.

Oasis town · Khaasarate of Zarvand, the Deep Sands · about 2,000 people

Seven days south of Kumirekh a caravan sees a line of palms, and the camels smell the water first. The Oasis of Durkis is a spring-fed pool in a hollow among low dunes, ringed by date palms and mud-brick walls, with a square caravanserai on its north side. At the gate a Khaasar's clerk takes the Salt Gift and writes down every camel. Past the pool the black tents of the Durkis tent are pitched or gone, as the season falls, and nobody in the town will say where they went.

At a glance. The Khaasar claims the Deep Sands as a province and nobody governs them, and Durkis is the exception that proves it. A Khaasar's clerk and a small post of camel troops keep the caravanserai, the well and the gate for the Grand Vizier. The Durkis tent of the Deep Sands Nomads has used the spring longer than there has been a Khaasar, and the town lives by agreement between the two. It lives on water: the caravanserai, dates, and the salt and news that move on the road between Kumirekh and Vonteen-Shorooq. The clerk keeps a small fire-temple, the nomads lean to the Shadowed and the Whisperers, and the drivers to the Road Spirit. It is one of the few desert waters the Khaasar's maps do show. Direction: STABLE.

The town. Everything is built around the Pool, a spring-fed basin about a hundred paces across, walled with old brick and reached by steps worn into hollows. Vashos-Durkis ("caravanserai of Durkis") on the north side has two stories of rooms around a courtyard, stabling for about two hundred camels, and a desert bulbul in every palm. The Palm Ground south of the pool is the date grove, owned partly by the Khaasar and partly by the tent, and nobody has ever written down which trees are whose.

Life and trade. A bed and supper at the caravanserai costs a balaal, and water and a stall for a camel a quarter balaal, the same as anywhere on the Spice Way. South of Durkis lies the Long Dry, some three hundred miles of road to Vonteen-Shorooq with no water on any map, and caravans rest here three days and fill every skin before they go on. The court goes to the lake by river, and this road carries salt, dates, camels, smugglers, and people who would rather not be seen on the river. Durkis means "light." The clerks like to point out that Prince Durkaad's name comes from the same word, and the nomads do not care.

People. Mozaaft of the Deep Sands waters his camels here and is on good terms with every clerk. The Durkis tent is one of the six tents of the Deep Sands Nomads, who move between waters the Khaasar's maps do not show and think reading a city sickness.

Hooks. - Mozaaft, men say, has taken on Faasheer's assassins, Durkaad's envoys and a Castavari agent to guide across the Sunmaw in the same week. All three parties will need to water at Durkis on the same night. - The pool's steps show the water a hand lower this year. The Durkis have told the clerk they know of another spring and will not tell him where. - A Whisperer has come in from the dunes and sits by the gate saying that a prince will die on the Long Dry.

Town · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Royal Mazbaaran · about 7,000 people

The road south from Mazbaaran's Gold Bridge runs about eleven days through the last date groves and fields and then, all at once, into sand. Kumirekh stands on that line. It is a town of red-brown mud brick behind a low wall, with a camel market that fills half of it, and the wind that comes over its walls from the south is always hot and always carries grit. Caravans from the valley stop here to trade their mules and asses for camels, and caravans coming out of the desert stop to wash and shave before they reach the capital.

At a glance. Kumirekh lies at the southern edge of Royal Mazbaaran, so it has no Jaarzeb. A toll-clerk of the Grand Vizier keeps its gate and its tolls, and a company of the Unfading keeps its wall. It lives on camels, on caravans changing river beasts for desert ones, on Deep Sands salt, and on smuggling. It keeps the Faith of the Eternal Flame, with many Shadowed among the desert-born. Its name, kumirekh, is the red of a tent-clan, and it calls to mind the Kumir, the tent into which Mozaaft was born. Direction: RISING.

The town. The Red Gate on the south side faces the desert, and there the Salt Gift is given; on the north the Valley Gate faces Mazbaaran. Between them the Camel Market (Kermaab-Khovavi, "camel market") covers half the town, a great open yard of pens, water troughs and sellers' awnings. The Well-House at its center is the town's only deep well, kept by the salest-diggers, who say it is holding up better than the Talodin. Along the east wall Kumir Row is a street of salt stores and date warehouses, where the tent's red headcloths are seen in the cool season.

Life and trade. A sound baggage camel sells for about sixty balaal here, and a slab of Shorooq salt the length of a forearm buys a sheep from the Kumir at the Red Gate. Unlicensed poppy moves north from Kumirekh to Mazbaaran under bales of dates, and Deep Sands salt moves outside the tolls. The Grand Vizier's clerk knows it, and catches enough to keep his post. Townspeople eat dates, flatbread, camel's milk and mutton, and argue about who is buying guides this year, and for what. On the Night of the Flame the town lights fires on the wall toward the desert, which the old say is for the travelers still out on the sand.

People. Mozaaft of the Deep Sands (36) was born to the Kumir and owns two descendants of the camel that walked to Mazbaaran alone. Brother Ash has been seen on the Kumirekh road, walking toward the city that exiled him.

Hooks. - Every prince has sent men to Kumirekh to hire guides who can cross the Sunmaw without using the Khaasar's wells. The price of a good guide has tripled since spring. - A poppy shipment was seized at the Red Gate with a prince's seal among the dates. The clerk has not decided which prince to tell. - Brother Ash means to preach in Mazbaaran's fire-temple square. Before he gets there he must pass the Unfading on Kumirekh's wall.

Town · Khaasarate of Zarvand, Meemakh of Kebidaan · about 8,000 people

Coming east from Castavar's fortress of Cluvedo, you cross ten days of dry scrub and see Daalher first as a dark smudge on the plain: the date palms. The town takes its name from them (daalher, "date palm"), and it lives inside a grove of perhaps forty thousand trees watered from deep wells. The walls are low and old, and the first building inside the West Gate is the customs house, larger than the fire-temple. Castavari muleteers wait outside it in the shade with wine barrels and sealed chests, and every one of them hands the gate-keeper a handful of salt.

At a glance. A deputy of the Jaarzeb of Kebidaan governs the town, keeps a small garrison, and takes a twentieth at the gate. Daalher is Zarvand's nearest town to Castavar and the realm's front door to the west. It lives on dates and on the Castavari trade, which never stops even in crusade years: red wine and silver come in; saffron, pepper, paper and star tables go out. Trade and news from the Llovo country pass through it first. It keeps the Flame, with many Shadowed among the grove-workers. Like every Zarvani gate, it expects the Salt Gift. It is one of the few Zarvani towns that does not stand on or near the Talodin. Direction: RISING.

The town. The Customs House inside the West Gate is where every Castavari chest is opened, weighed and entered. The Changers' Arch beside it shelters the money-changers who turn jabirga into balaal, and this year Daalher's changers give about seventeen balaal for twenty jabirga. Castavari Row is a street of wine-sellers and muleteers' inns just inside the wall, where Castavari is spoken more than Zarvani and the Berrode is kept behind closed doors. The Grove Wells are the town's life: forty deep wells with ox-wheels that turn day and night in the dry months.

Life and trade. In Daalher, the Sixth Month, which shares the town's name, climbers go up every palm to cut the date clusters, and the town eats fresh dates for a month and dries the rest. A cup of Castavari red costs an eighth of a balaal here, half its price in Mazbaaran. The townsfolk argue about the silver. Zarrit in Mazbaaran has changed more Castavari silver this year than in the last five, for men who are not merchants, and most of it came in through Daalher's Customs House. They eat dates, flatbread, goat and lentils, and drink more wine than anyone else in the Khaasarate.

People. Raznib the Gatekeeper (raznib, "silver") is the Jaarzeb's customs clerk at the West Gate, a careful man of about thirty-five who writes down every chest of silver that comes in, and has begun writing down who carries it.

Hooks. - Castavari silver is coming through in strange amounts, and the men carrying it are not merchants. Raznib's list could tell a prince who is being bought. - If the Fourth Crusade comes by land around the south end of the Spine instead of through the Tharaxi Gap, Daalher is the first Zarvani town in its path. The Jaarzeb of Kebidaan has asked Mazbaaran for troops and heard nothing. - A Castavari muleteer has been caught with forged star tables bound inside a Berrode prayer book, going the wrong way, into Zarvand.

Hold · Hizkari · about 1,500 people

The road from Zarvand climbs onto black ash, runs two days with no green but ash-grass, and enters a broken crater in the heart of the Cinder Teeth. The Hold fills it: rough black stone houses stepped up the crater's inner wall, steam rising from hot springs at its foot, and over everything the Matron's hall, long and low, its roof weighted with lava stones against the wind. The air smells of sulfur, goat and naphtha.

At a glance. The Iron Matron, whom her people call Mother of Fire, rules the Hold and all five clans of the slopes by being the one they all fear. The crater and its fighters are its only wall. The Hold lives on naphtha, sold to the Khaasar for gold and now shown to Castavari envoys for silver, and on sulfur, obsidian, bat guano and cinder swift nests. Its faith is the Mother of Fire, whose blood the naphtha is. Khaasareem's envoys have bargained in her hall since 851. Direction: STABLE, though only because both buyers are kept nervous.

The town. The Matron's Hall is one long room with a hearth down its middle. Every Hizkari hearth is said to be lit from the ember a fire-beetle carried through the eruption of 622, and this one first. Castavari envoys have been received here since 1140. The Guest-Hut next door lodges caravan-masters, and its walls are thin. The Jar Yard below the hall is where naphtha from the seeps is poured into carrying jars, sealed and counted, with a slab of salt set aside for every ten. The Cisterns under the crater floor hold the Hold's rainwater. They are lined with a gray mortar of ash and lime that sets hard under water, the last remnant of the Builders' black stone. The Burn Stone is a slab of rock by the hot springs that stays lava-warm, where the young come of age.

Life and trade. In 1146 the Khaasar buys about twelve thousand jars a year at a talod a jar, with a slab of salt in every ten, because fire sold without salt in the bargain is stolen from the mountain. The Hold buys grain, salt and cloth and sells obsidian to the Tzalan. Its people eat cinder goat and caravan grain and rub sulfur-flower salve into their skin. A Hizkari come of age lays a hand on the Burn Stone as long as they can bear it, and the scar is the clan's mark; the Matron's whole left arm tells how long. A few Baamarsh Converts have come up the mountain this year, and the Matron lets them stay for their Castavari. The worst punishment is to be driven from the slopes.

People. The Iron Matron (57) is broad and ash-gray, with a necklace of obsidian teeth and burn-scars glazing her left arm, and she feeds her clans first. Her son Hizikaad the Younger (30) leads the Seep-Keepers and is the only man alive who knows where every seep lies; he wants to sell to Castavar. Mozaaft of the Deep Sands sleeps in the Guest-Hut when he is in the Teeth.

Hooks. - A Castavari envoy sits in the hall with a chest of silver, and Mozaaft, in the Guest-Hut, has woken to voices next door. - The largest seep, it is feared, will stop flowing, and Hizikaad knows why and has not told his mother. - A Celestial Table scholar would give anything for the cistern mortar, which the Hizkari use to line water tanks.

Village · Tzalan · about 1,500 people · no map point

The Keepers' village lies up a side creek of the Nhal where the canopy closes overhead and the water turns black. Nobody reaches it without a river-village canoe-man, and Chelpan's people keep watch at the creek mouth. The village is a ring of stilted houses around a clearing of drying racks, where long curls of reddish bark hang in the smoke. Past it, under the taller trees, the groves begin. The smell is sharp and bitter, and outsiders say they taste it for days.

At a glance. The village keeps its own elders' council and lives under the protection of Chelpan and his River Council, as one leg of the river's peace with the Nhal River Villages and the Mud-Eaters, against both Sutzam and the outsiders' forts. It has no wall. Its guard is the secrecy of the creek and the canoes of the river villages. It lives on bitter-bark, the only cure for the jungle fever, which it grows, strips and prepares, and on the maize, fish and turtle eggs it gets in return. It keeps the Sun and Serpent faith as the river villages do, half-remembered. Ixatl covets it, and every garrison on the river would kill for it. Direction: CONTESTED.

The town. The Groves are why the village exists: stands of bitter-bark trees planted and tended by the Keepers longer than anyone can count, and stripped a little at a time so that no tree dies. The Drying Racks in the central clearing hang with bark curing over slow, smoky fires. The Mortar House is where the bark is ground and portioned, and only Keepers may enter it. The Landing at the creek mouth is where Chelpan's canoe-men meet traders, envoys, and anyone who has lost the way.

Life and trade. The Keepers strip bark in the dry season and cure it before the rains. What leaves the village goes downriver in small sealed bundles through the river villages. A course of bark for one man's fever costs an iron knife or a forearm slab of salt at the Landing, and by the time it reaches the spice-forts a garrison man pays a talod for it. The Keepers eat maize, fish, turtle eggs and tapir, and drink cacao with chili. Each child's sun-quetzal feather is kept in the village, not sent to Sutzam, and Ixatl has marked it. They argue whether to sell more, and to whom.

People. Chelpan (50), elder of the river villages, protects the Keepers and holds, in their bark, the only cure on the continent for the fever. Sun-Speaker Ixatl has sent envoys three times this year. The Kaishoni garrisons of Magistrate Tsehei Kaukai and the Zarvani spice-forts both buy through Chelpan and would rather not.

Hooks. - If the jungle fever rides the caravans north to Mazbaaran and Solvaine, Chelpan holds the only cure. - A Kaishoni officer has offered the Landing a year's iron for a single live bitter-bark sapling. - The Keepers' eldest has asked Chelpan whether the village should go to Sutzam before Sutzam comes to the village. - A Zarvani physician scattered from the House of Learning has reached the creek mouth asking to learn how the bark is prepared.

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City · Kaishon · about 240,000 people, and 6,000 more on the water

The east road from Kokrin runs twelve days through paddy country, and on the last morning the wind turns salt. You smell Chaiyo before it shows itself: seaweed drying on bamboo racks for miles along the road, tuna oil, tar and low tide. Then the Muhau opens into its brown estuaries, and the city shows on the north bank above a river so crowded with hulls the water barely shows. Out on the mudflats the family junks of the Boat-People lie lashed together in rafts, and at the harbor mouth the sea-lions bark from their rocks at every boat that passes.

At a glance. A magistrate sent from Kokrin rules Chaiyo, and the harbor belongs to the Chaiyo squadron of sea war junks, but in truth the city is run by its merchant families, the heart of the Open Gate party. A rammed-earth wall faced with brick closes the landward side, and the river and the squadron guard the rest. Chaiyo lives on the Chaiyo tuna; on seaweed and coast crab; on the ginseng, silk-goat cloth and sturgeon that come down the Muhau from Tsenkin; and on the coastal junk trade to the Tsanha mouth and the north. It keeps the Doctrine in public and the Unseen Kin in every kitchen and on every boat. It is known for tuna, cormorant fishing, the Boat-People, and the Salt Brotherhood's Long Reach, which comes more often than Kokrin knows. Its direction is RISING, because every spring the tribute silver leaves Kokrin and the Open Gate's case grows stronger, and if a single gate is ever opened to trade, Chaiyo's counting-houses already hold the credit to pay for it.

The town. Chaiyo stands where the Muhau widens into its estuaries, a day's sail above the open sea, and climbs from the quays up a low rise. The Tuna Stair is the heart of the waterfront, a flight of stone landings where the tuna fleet unloads before dawn and the fish are cut, salted and packed while the gulls scream overhead. Behind it, on the rise, lies Téhei ("rich"), the ward of walled merchant compounds whose families keep branch counting-houses in Kokrin's Rókshái and lend on silk and tea. Out on the mud stands the Tenth Dock, a long timber pier where the Boat-People bring their catch alongside and pay the dock tax, a tenth of what they land. They pass the fish up in baskets and never step onto the planks, and the clerks lean down to count. The Kite Mole is the stone breakwater downstream where the squadron's junks lie, among them the flagship Tèkba-Meksi ("new rampart"). By day the squadron speaks with kites from the mastheads, and by night with lanterns. The Barking Rocks at the harbor mouth are the sea-lions' ground, and the cormorant boats go out past them at dusk.

Life and trade. Chaiyo eats rice with tuna, fresh, salted or dried, and Chaiyo seaweed with everything. Coast crab comes out of the estuaries in autumn and goes to Kokrin live in baskets. Children learn early to look for the banded coast krait in the shallows. The tuna fleet sails with the Crane Winds, onshore in summer and offshore in winter, and the storms at the turn of the season wreck more junks than any enemy. In Mûhauhi, the Sixth Month, the Muhau floods and the low wards by the Tuna Stair go under for a week. The city argues about the fifth taken at the Jade Gate, about the tribute, and about whether the Boat-People are Kaishoni. A bowl of rice with salt tuna on the Tuna Stair costs a twentieth of a tsinkya, a live coast crab in autumn a tenth, a trained cormorant 2 tsinkya, and a porter earns 1 tsinkya a day. Chaiyo keeps Kite Day in Nairui and Feeding the Kin on the 6th of Shôktéwâ. Its own custom is the Turning, the day in Tápèkòn when the Crane Winds swing offshore. The fleet stays in, and every fishing household sets a bowl by the stove for its drowned.

People. Chaishosâ the Junk-Captain (55) commands the squadron from the Kite Mole. He is quietly of the Open Gate and has not reported the Long Reach's visits in eleven years. Lonre of the Long Reach, in her thirties, has made the voyage from Wreckers Cove five times and trades with the Boat-People and the merchants of Téhei. The richest family of Téhei is the Gyonba, rice brokers and tuna merchants of the Open Gate. Shaupa the Pearl-Broker (shaupa, "pearl") keeps the next-largest counting-house. She is a widow of about fifty who buys the Isle pearls the Long Reach brings east before the Gyonba can, and sells them in Kokrin without saying where they came from.

Hooks. - A new clerk at the Tenth Dock has begun counting hulls, and the Long Reach is due within the month. - Shaupa's house has bought a thousand chests of Shanyo tea, far more than Chaiyo drinks, as if she expects the Tolmar to ask for trade instead of silver. - Lonre carries a letter from Captain-Queen Vex for the elders of the Boat-People, the first step of Vex's ring of water-peoples. - A Boat-People girl stepped onto the Tenth Dock last autumn. The rafts have not decided what she is now.

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City · Kaishon · about 140,000 people

The road from Kokrin follows the Shauho valley south eight days, and the paddies give way to hills of camphor forest where gibbons sing at dawn. Sorogei stands on a rise above the upper Shauho, the smell of camphor sap over everything. Its brick walls are the highest in the southwest, because the city remembers why. Outside the south gate, on the road to the Reach, a pot of soup steams under a camphor tree beside a small shrine, and a line of conscripts waits for a bowl.

At a glance. A magistrate from Kokrin governs the city, but the commander of the Sorogei garrison, the southern army that crushed the Reasoned Rebellion of 1019, is the second power in it and often the first. Its walls were rebuilt higher after the steppe sack of 341 and have never been taken since. Sorogei lives on the garrison's pay, on rice, on camphor wood and camphor chests, on the Shauho barges to Kokrin, and on the road south through Hyunei to the jungle garrisons. It keeps the Doctrine strictly within the walls and the Unseen Kin at Old Tsau's shrine outside them. It is known for the sack that began the Long Rampart, the garrison of 1019, camphor chests and Old Tsau. Its direction is STABLE. The garrison is paid, the barges run and the walls are sound, but the fever and the Loosened Reins are both coming north from the Reach along the same road.

The town. Sorogei is a walled oval, the garrison on its high side and the river on its low. The Old Breach is a gap in the city's first wall, left unmended since 341, where the raiders came in. The new wall runs outside it, and the Doctrine keeps the breach as a lesson, with a stone that reads "Here the Rampart was begun." The Red Barracks fill the high ground behind a red-lacquered gate and house the garrison, its crossbow stores and its officers' families. Below them lies the Crossbow Ground, where the weapons taken from the rebels were burned in 1019, and where the garrison now drills with repeating crossbows every morning. The Camphor Yards along the east wall hold the sawyers and chest-makers, whose work scents half the city. The Shauho Steps are the river landing, where rice barges load for Kokrin and sit on the mud in the low water of late summer.

Life and trade. Sorogei eats rice, paddy eel, pork and bamboo shoots, and drinks Shanyo tea brought more than a month's journey south. Its camphor chests are the city's pride: officials in every province keep their silk in them, because nothing eats it there. The Kaishon tiger of the southern hills is the Emperor's hunt and no one else may take one, which the villages resent every time a buffalo is killed. The red Sorogei centipede gets into boots, and every porter shakes his out before dawn. People argue about the Reach, the fever, and what the garrison would do if Kokrin sent it an order no one liked. A camphor clothes-chest costs 3 tsinkya, a bowl of rice and eel a twentieth, and a bowl of Old Tsau's soup nothing, though she asks a piece of news in return. On the night of the Rampart Muster, the 1st of Yasâuchên, the Red Barracks lights a fire on its own gate tower in answer to the wall, four days' march west, though nobody on the wall can see it. On the 6th of Shôktéwâ the magistrates' wives walk out to Old Tsau's shrine with bowls, and their husbands do not see them go.

People. Old Tsau (70s) has kept her forbidden shrine to the household spirits on the Sorogei road for fifty years. She gives soup to conscripts and advice to everyone, and claims to remember the Reasoned Rebellion, and she is lying beautifully when she says so. Magistrate Tsehei Kaukai of the Southern Reach passes through twice a year on his way to Kokrin and always stops at the shrine, where his wife insists on leaving an offering. The garrison commander and the city magistrate go unnamed here.

Hooks. - A peasant girl of the Reach whom Old Tsau tutored has sat the provincial examination under her brother's name. - Jungle fever has reached Hyunei. If it comes up the road, Old Tsau's shrine is the nearest thing to a house of healing between the Reach and Kokrin. - Two old garrison men of 1019 still drink in the Camphor Yards, and one of them says Old Tsau fed the rebels too. - Loosened Reins officials from the Reach have begun meeting in a Camphor Yards teahouse, and the garrison commander has not reported it.

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City · Kaishon · about 70,000 people

From the south you come to Shanyo through twelve days of tea hills from Tsentsui, the rows running along every slope and the black-and-white magpies chattering from the hedges. The city stands on the north coast facing a gray sea, and its seaward side is one long wall of stone and brick. That wall was built after 763, when longships came out of the fog and burned the harbor. Down on the water, war junks of the northern squadron lie under the mole, and on a clear day a man on the wall can see a Hrodvald sail on the edge of the sea, which nobody in Shanyo ever fails to notice.

At a glance. A magistrate from Kokrin governs the city, and the commander of the northern squadron, based under the sea forts where the Rampart's northern line was carried to the shore after 763, keeps the harbor. The Sea Wall faces the water, and a brick wall closes the landward side. Shanyo lives on Shanyo tea, the Dominion's daily drink and its second export after silk; on Shanyo deer velvet; on fish; on the coastal junk trade with Chaiyo; and since 1144 on trade with the Hrodvald through the Pony Gate on the Fevstel road. It keeps the Doctrine and the Unseen Kin like every Kaishoni city, with extra care for the Door-Kin. It is known for its tea, the Barerk Raid of 763, and Selra Stormbrand's raid of 1138. Its direction is RISING, because the north now comes to trade instead of burn, the grain the Hrodvald buy on Caelvennois credit sails north in ships hired here, and if the Hearthking ever comes to talk to Kaishon, she will come to Shanyo.

The town. The Sea Wall runs the whole length of the waterfront, pierced by three water gates that close with bronze-bound doors, and the squadron's crossbowmen walk its top at night. The Tea Scales is the long hall by the landward gate where the ministry weighs, seals and stores the season's tea, the thousand chests that go to the Cherüsh with the tribute each spring among it. The Empty Ward is the old fishers' quarter by the harbor. It was never filled again after 763, because the fishers who lived fled north and became the Barerk Whalers. Its houses now store tea, and Hrodvald traders lodge there in summer. The North Mole shelters the war junks and the merchant junks that run to Chaiyo in two or three weeks. The Magpie Tower is a six-story brick watch-pagoda over the harbor, full of magpie nests. Its watch saw Selra's sails in 1138 too late to do anything but ring the bell.

Life and trade. Shanyo eats rice, fish, pork and pickled greens, and drinks more tea than any city in the Dominion. In Kàshòkdau, the Second Month, the first picking comes down from the hills. The magistrate tastes the first cup in the Tea Scales, and the year's price is posted on the door. Deer velvet is cut in early summer and sold to physicians in Kokrin. Since 1144 Hrodvald traders have come through the Pony Gate with furs, walrus ivory, amber and Fevur ponies, and leave with tea, rice and cloth. A cup of Shanyo tea costs a twentieth of a tsinkya here, half the Kokrin price. A chest of first-picking tea costs 4 tsinkya, a Fevur pony brought through the Pony Gate about 40 tsinkya, and a pair of deer antlers in velvet a mihomau. The city keeps Kite Day, the Muster and Feeding the Kin. Its own custom is the Empty Nets: on the day the city keeps for the sack of 763, the old fishing families hang a net with nothing in it on their doors.

People. Hearthking Selra Stormbrand (41) led the raid of 1138, taking Stormbrand longships down the Farvig Outflow and east along the coast, past the sea forts by night, to strike at dawn. Shanyo's older people can describe her red hair from the wall. The Barerk Whalers, among them descendants of Shanyo's fishers, and their Harpoon-Master Bekil (about 45) are remembered here as cousins who went the wrong way. The magistrate and the squadron commander go unnamed here.

Hooks. - Selra's longships may come east again, this time under a truce banner, and Princess Seitotai may be the one who receives them. - The squadron commander has never forgiven the night watch of 1138, and has begun counting every Hrodvald sail that passes, which is the one thing a Hrodvald will never do. - A Barerk Whaler at the Empty Ward speaks a mixed tongue with Kaishoni words in it, and an old woman of the fishing families has heard her grandmother's name in it. - The tribute tea for this spring has been weighed twice, because the Tea Scales clerks heard the Tolmar might send the silver back.

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City · Hrodvald · about 5,000 people

Barmin sits on the River Barerk four nights above the sea, at the far eastern end of the road from Krasvuv through Durvek. It is one of the few places in the Frostmarch large enough to be called a city. You smell it first, rendered whale oil and smoke, and then see a long palisade on the river bluff with turf roofs piled behind it. The gate is framed by the two jawbones of a Barerk whale, taller than the palisade, and the road passes between them. Below the bluff, sea longships and whaleboats lie in rows on the gravel, and oil casks come upriver every week of the short summer.

At a glance. Barmin is the seat of Clan Barerk, ruled by its stelest and its reldith. A pine palisade closes the bluff, with a ditch on the land side and a stake-line in the river. The city lives on whale oil, walrus ivory, baleen, ice seal and amber from its coast; on the sea longships that work the northeast shore; and on the one whale in five it takes from the Barerk Whalers. It keeps the Old Ones in the hall and the storm priests' grove, while Salt-Sworn and Sun-Turners live along its coast. It is known for the Barerk Raid of 763, for its sea longships, and for the whale that gives both clan and river their name, barerk being the Hrodvaldr word for whale. Its direction is CONTESTED, because the Whalers on its coast are electing their own leader and growing richer than the clan that taxes them, and the Sun-Turners the storm priests hate bring the grain the city needs.

The town. The Whale Gate is the jawbone gate on the Krasvuv road. The hrinduk say the whale was killed the year of the Barerk Raid; the shipwrights say the bones have been replaced twice since. The Tusk Hall crowns the bluff. It is the stelest's longhouse, its roof-posts bound with walrus tusks and its gables carved as whales instead of dragons, with the Hearth-Stone of Clan Barerk in its hearth. The Oil Strand is the river landing below, where casks are rolled up from the boats and weighed, and where the clan's hinrell ("market") meets in summer around a scale on a pine beam. The Ivory Sheds stand along the palisade, where tusks are sorted and carvers make combs, gaming pieces and hilt-plates. The Raid Post is a tall carved post outside the Tusk Hall showing the longships of 763 rowing down the coast to Shanyo, and children climb it.

Life and trade. Barmin eats fjord cod dried on racks, seal, whale meat in the good years, rye bread and cloudberries, and burns whale oil in its lamps while Krasvuv burns seal oil. The whale month is Barerk, the Fifth Month, when the Vuvud meets at Krasvuv and half the clan's crews are away, which is an old grievance. The city argues about the Whalers, the Sun-Turners' lamp, and whether Selra's trade has reached the east yet. A cup of mead costs a tenth of a mark's weight, a walrus tusk seven marks' weight on the Oil Strand (it fetches ten at Krasvuv), and a cask of whale oil four. Barmin keeps the ice-breaking in Bryrso, Midwinter Silence on the 6th of Stauni, and a feast of its own, the First Whale, when the season's first whale is towed ashore and the stelest cuts the first slice with his own knife.

People. Grartan Fifth-Whale (grartan, "walrus") is stelest of Clan Barerk, a broad, slow, gray-bearded man of about sixty with two voyage bands. He voted for Selra in 1144 and is still waiting for her grain. He takes his fifth whale from the Whalers every season, has never been able to take more, and tells everyone that one in five is the Old Way. Bekil the Harpoon-Master (about 45), the half-Uusung whaler with eleven whales to his own iron, comes to the Oil Strand to pay the fifth and stays no longer than he must.

Hooks. - The Sun-Turners on the Barerk coast are rebuilding the lamp-house Kruman burned in 1140, and a Caelvennois grain ship is due the same week. - Grartan has asked Bekil for two whales in five this year, pleading the bad winter. Bekil answered that the Whalers would bring the whales to Shanyo instead. - Some of the men who helped Kruman burn the lamp-house in 1140 were Barerk men, and the Sun-Turners know which. - If Selra goes east to Kaishon she will need Barerk's sea longships, and Grartan will want the grain first.

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Town · Kaishon · about 30,000 people

Hyunei lies ten days south of Sorogei, where the imperial road runs out of rice country into the edge of the jungle. It is the last imperial town before the Verdant Deep. Rain falls every afternoon, the air smells of wet sawdust and pepper, and ox-carts of mahogany grind in through the south gate all day, guarded by conscripts who watch the canopy more than the road.

At a glance. Hyunei is the seat of Magistrate Tsehei Kaukai, who has governed the Southern Reach fifteen years. It has a brick wall and a garrison, and it supplies the jungle garrisons past it. It lives on mahogany, pepper and the garrisons' pay. The Doctrine rules the magistrate's hall and the Unseen Kin everywhere else. Every roadside shrine around the town holds a small clay head for Tsehei Yotoke, some families follow the Sun and Serpent, and a few Empty Bowl monks beg here. Its direction is CONTESTED, because the Tzalan are killing its sentries, the fever is moving north, and the Loosened Reins would like Hyunei to answer to itself.

The town. The Magistrate's Hall stands at the center, with a fish pond and the Jade Room, where Tsehei Kaukai keeps the finest jade in the south. The Timber Yards fill the ground inside the south gate, where mahogany is sawn for the Sorogei road. The Pepper Sheds by the market are long, dark, sneezing halls where pepper from the garrisons is dried and sealed. The Garrison Gate is the south gate itself, where every party going into the Deep is counted out and, when it can be, counted back. At the crossroads outside the north gate stands the Head Shrine, the largest roadside shrine in the Reach, with a clay head the size of a real one.

Life and trade. Hyunei eats rice, pork, river fish, and more pepper than anyone in the Dominion. Mahogany and pepper go north; rice, iron, salt and cloth come south for the garrisons. The town argues about the Tzalan, the fever and the examinations, which since Emperor Shaiku opened them to the south have been sat at the provincial level in the Magistrate's Hall. A day's sawing pays 1 tsinkya, a pound of pepper costs half a tsinkya at the sheds, and a strip of Tzalan bitter-bark, when anyone has one, costs a mihomau. On the 6th of Shôktéwâ, Feeding the Kin, families also set a bowl at the Head Shrine, and the magistrate's watch is posted elsewhere that night.

People. Magistrate Tsehei Kaukai (39) is plump, silk-robed and sweating, afraid of the Tzalan, an audit and his wife, and able: the roads are good, the granaries full and the garrisons paid. The three sentries killed by Kaltzi (16) of the Canopy Folk have their names posted at the Garrison Gate.

Hooks. - Ixatl's Tzalan have burned a logging garrison and sent the heads down the Nhal on rafts, and the magistrate is drafting a report that calls it a flood. - A peasant girl has passed the provincial examination under her brother's name, and the magistrate has found out. - A heretic who teaches conscripts' children to read has been arrested in the market, and a Kaishoni-born pilgrim woman has asked to argue for him in the Doctrine's own language. - The first fever cases have come in through the Garrison Gate, and the only bitter-bark in town is in the Jade Room.

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Town · Kaishon · about 45,000 people

The road from Kokrin's Cricket Gate runs southeast eight days through the flattest rice country in the Dominion, where the only hills are the dikes. Tauya shows first as a line of granary roofs above the paddies, then as a wall with a canal running under it. The canal is busier than the road, and at night the crickets in the dike grass are louder than the town.

At a glance. A magistrate from Kokrin governs Tauya, and the officer of the Tsanha-mouth squadron is the other voice in it. It has a rammed-earth wall faced with brick and a water gate on the canal. Tauya is the grain-tax port of the lower Tsanha, where the rice-tax of the southeast is gathered and sent upriver to Kokrin's Yomìn. It lives also on sea salt, the squadron and crickets. It keeps the Doctrine and the Unseen Kin, and every granary has a bowl by its door. It is known for its granaries, its canal and its fighting crickets. Its direction is STABLE: Tauya's fortune rises and falls with the harvest, not with the court.

The town. Tauya is a square on a raised platform above the flood. Hukùishai ("canal") is what everyone calls the canal and its quays, cut by the engineering corps to carry barges from the town to the lower Tsanha. Granary Row lines it with grain-tax warehouses on stone piers, each numbered and sealed by the magistrate. The Cricket Farms are the villages outside the east wall, where families breed crickets in clay jars and sell them up the road. Tauya says Kokrin's Cricket Gate is named for them, and Kokrin does not agree. The Brine Fields lie on the coast at the Tsanha mouth, and beside them the Squadron Yard, where the sea war junks guarding the river road to Kokrin lie behind a stockade.

Life and trade. Tauya eats rice, paddy eel, river fish and salt pork, and drinks Shanyo tea and rice ale. It argues about the grain-tax measure, and whether a clerk's thumb is on the scale. The harvest barges gather on the Hukùishai in Chígútá, the Seventh Month, and go upriver in convoys guarded by river war junks. A porter's day on Granary Row pays 1 tsinkya, a pound of salt costs an eighth, and a Tauya fighting cricket half a tsinkya, though a good one fetches five times that in Kokrin. Besides Kite Day and Feeding the Kin, the town keeps the Sealing at the end of Chígútá, when the magistrate seals the last granary door and the town eats the rice that fell on the quays.

People. No famous name lives in Tauya, which Tauya counts a blessing. Nèiri Black-Sleeve, who owns the Cricket Pits on Kokrin's Crooked Bank, buys her crickets here in person each spring.

Hooks. - A granary on the Row has been sealed three years and never opened, and its register says it is full. - Nèiri paid a Cricket Farms family ten times the usual price for one cricket, and two other buyers have followed her down the road. - The Brine Fields' clerks have found Castavari coin in the brine sheds, which means a ship has called that nobody wrote down. - The squadron has been ordered to guard this year's rice convoys all the way to Kokrin, which it has never done before.

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Town · Kaishon · about 18,000 people

Tsentsui lies eight days' climb northeast of Tsenkin, on the road from the archive-city's Muhau Landing to Shanyo. You come up through bamboo and then pine, and the town shows on a ridge where the Tsenkin mountains fall away to the tea hills of the north. Its name is the Kaishoni word for pine, the same word that names the Eleventh Month. In spring the town smells of tea leaves roasting on iron pans, and a twisted jade pine older than the wall leans over the magistrate's gate.

At a glance. A magistrate from Kokrin governs Tsentsui, with a small garrison for the road. It has a low stone wall and a gate at each end of its one long street. It lives on tea, which comes in from the northern hills to be roasted and packed for the road south, and on travelers between Tsenkin and Shanyo: scholars, officials, tea buyers and conscripts. Its faith is the Doctrine, the Unseen Kin, and the Empty Bowl, whose monks come down from the range to beg. It is known for tea, jade pines and a good inn. Its direction is STABLE, because the tea trade grows a little each year while the scholars bound for Tsenkin grow fewer.

The town. The Drying Floors are terraces on the south slope where tea is roasted and rolled by hand in spring. The Chest Yards hold the coopers who make paper-lined bamboo tea chests and the ministry clerk who seals them. The Old Pine at the magistrate's gate is propped on stone crutches, and brides touch it for a long marriage. The Last Page is the inn at the south end of the street, where scholars from Shanyo and the north spend their last night before Tsenkin arguing over what they will copy. The Bowl Stair climbs west to an Empty Bowl monastery an hour above the town, and its monks come down every morning with their bowls.

Life and trade. Tsentsui eats rice brought up from the south, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and pork, and drinks its own tea. It argues about the tea price posted at Shanyo, and about the Hill-Folk who come to trade. In Kàshòkdau, the Second Month, every household goes to the drying floors, and the First Roast falls on the evening the first pan is finished, when the first cup is poured for the Stove-Kin. A chest of packed tea costs 3 tsinkya, a bed and supper at the Last Page 1 tsinkya, and a day on the drying floors three-quarters of a tsinkya.

People. Tsentsui has no famous townsfolk. The monks of the Bowl Stair say General Dezau Honmyan spent his year among the Empty Bowl in their house and left because "they were right and it was unbearable," and every other monastery in the range says the same of itself.

Hooks. - A monk of the Bowl Stair has gone north to the sea forts to walk the whole Rampart, begging at every tower, and two conscripts of the road garrison have deserted to follow him. - A scholar at the Last Page has been paying to learn which servants of Tsenkin's Law Wing come from the hill villages. - Hill-Folk women are selling tea from gardens the register does not know of, and the magistrate cannot decide whether to tax them or not see them. - Tea buyers from Shanyo say Hrodvald traders have begun asking for Tsentsui tea by name.

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Town · Hrodvald · about 1,500 people

Durvek is fourteen nights east of Krasvuv on the road to Barmin, and the last stretch runs along the edge of the taiga with the trees close on the right hand. The town stands on a bare hill the clan cleared long ago so that nothing can come at it unseen. Two palisades ring the hill, and the outer one is hung with wolf skulls, because durtha means wolf, and because this is the clan town nearest the Wolfmarch.

At a glance. Durvek is the seat of Clan Durtha, ruled by an aging stelest and the clan's reldith. It has a double palisade, a cleared hill, and watchers on the gate tower day and night. It lives on rye, furs, Durtha hare, elk hunted on skis, and the road trade between Krasvuv and Barmin. It keeps the Old Ones. It is known as Sauld Half-Sung's town, and as the clan town the Wolfmarch raids most. Its direction is FADING, because the outlaws take its cattle every winter, its young men leave to crew Stormbrand longships or to join Golen No-Clan, and fewer steads are worked each year.

The town. The Durtha Hall crowns the hill, with the clan's Hearth-Stone in its hearth and a wolf carved on each gable; when Sauld is home the benches are full. The Wolf Fence is the outer palisade, hung with the skull of every Frostmarch wolf killed on clan land, and children argue over which pack each came from. The Outlaw Post outside the gate is a bare pine post where the names of the clan's golest are cut in Storm-Runes, and it carries more names than any post in the north. The Hare Field below the hill is snared for the white Durtha hare in winter and sown with rye in summer.

Life and trade. Durvek eats rye bread, hare, elk and cloudberries, and drinks ale and mead. Furs go west to Krasvuv's Fur Yard, and hacksilver and grain come back, when they come at all. The town argues about the Wolfmarch, Selra's promises and Sauld's sagas. A Durtha hare pelt costs a tenth of a mark's weight, a loaf of rye bread the same except in the Ice Mother's Count, when there is none to buy, and a guest's bench and supper nothing. On Midwinter Silence, the 6th of Stauni, Durvek also keeps the Barred Night: every door is barred from sundown to sunup, because the Wolfmarch knows nobody will shout.

People. Sauld Durtha, "Sauld Half-Sung" (27), golden-haired and vain, with a lute and an axe, is rewriting the sagas to make Selra the hero of every one, and his clan is proud and nervous about it. Golen No-Clan, Kruman's nephew, raids Durtha land more than any other, and half the names on the Outlaw Post belong to men who follow him.

Hooks. - If Sauld is judged a false hrind for his Thalmirn saga, the clan must choose between defending him and giving up his tongue. - Wolfmarch men took forty cattle from the Hare Field and left one alive with Kruman's rune cut into its hide. - The old stelest wants Selra to send crews against the Wolfmarch, and Selra has asked him for longship crews first. - A Durvek girl who went to the Wolfmarch last spring came back to the gate in autumn with a message she will give only to the reldith.

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Town · Hrodvald · about 2,500 people

Nugvek lies at the western end of the road from Krasvuv, over the northern tail of the Spine past Lenrik, in a valley running down toward the western fjords. It is the only Hrodvald town where you may hear Hrodvaldr, Aldmere's tongue and Castavari in one yard. Its gate is hung with Dunmorrow iron, and its hall keeps a Castavari wine jar by the door. Nugag means cold, and the town is the quietest in the north.

At a glance. Nugvek is the seat of Clan Nugag, its chieftain Thuba Nugag, and its reldith. It has a single palisade and an iron-bound gate. It lives by trade more than raiding: iron with the Dunmorrow, timber and marriages with the Vargate Clans, furs on the Fur Trail, and in summer the Castavari merchantmen of the Salt Sea Lanes, who bring silver, wine, oil, cork and salt fish to the western fjords for furs, walrus ivory, amber and dried cod. Half the clan follows the Deep Cold, who do not lie and so are trusted with the scales. It is known for the white Nugag fox, for Thuba, and for marrying its daughters south. Its direction is RISING, because its trade grows every year and Thuba spends nothing on raids, but the Deep Cold half of the clan could still break it in two.

The town. The Nugag Hall holds the clan's Hearth-Stone, which has a crack across it that everyone pretends not to see. The Iron Yard by the east gate is where Dunmorrow steel is weighed against furs, and Vargate timber-men drink with Nugag traders. Mineyg ("bay, inlet") is Nugvek's landing at the head of a fjord three nights west, a shingle beach with a timber store-house where the Castavari ships anchor. The Marches Gate opens north onto the road to the Nugag Marches and is used almost only by the Deep Cold. The Frost Barrow north of town holds the Frost-Nugag, the clan-branch that died in the Great Winter of 1089; Thuba's grandmother, the last of them, lies at its end.

Life and trade. Nugvek eats rye bread, fjord salmon, dried cod, mutton and elk, and drinks mead, ale and, at Thuba's table, Castavari wine. It argues about the Deep Cold, and about which southern lord Thuba's next daughter will marry. A white Nugag fox pelt costs three marks' weight in the Iron Yard, a jug of Castavari red two, and a Dunmorrow steel axe fifteen, five less than at Krasvuv. The Castavari sails come in Barerk, and on Midwinter Silence the Deep Cold walk out through the Marches Gate onto the ice while the town leaves its doors unbarred for their return.

People. Thuba Nugag (34), dark-haired and flat-faced, with a bear-claw necklace she took herself, lost the Hearthking's election by four votes and has been perfectly, ominously loyal since. She speaks little and never twice. Her brother-in-law Grerik Coldbrook of the Vargate Clans visits every summer.

Hooks. - Three thousand Deep Cold have left through the Marches Gate for the Vuvud, and half of them are Thuba's own people. - The crack in the Hearth-Stone has grown, and if the Marches split, the stone must be broken. - A Castavari captain at the Mineyg has offered silver to winter a ship that does not want to be seen in Tandosa. - Thuba has not said whom she would back if Kruman challenges Selra, and both have sent her gifts.

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Town · Hrodvald · about 1,400 people

Fevstel stands at the eastern edge of the Clanholds, where the road from Krasvuv by Barmin meets the road to Kaishon's Shanyo. It is the only Hrodvald town from which you can see the Long Rampart: on a clear day its towers show on the eastern ridges two nights' ride off, gray and even, the way no Hrodvald would ever build. The town is a palisade on a low rise among pastures full of small shaggy ponies digging through the snow for grass.

At a glance. Fevstel is the seat of Clan Fevur, whose name means axe, ruled by its stelest and reldith. It has a pine palisade and a ditch. It lives on the Fevur pony, bred here and sold across the north; on furs and ivory from the coast; and since 1144 on trade through the Pony Gate with Shanyo. It keeps the Old Ones, while the Sun-Turners on the Fevur coast keep Iévaine's fire in a lamp that must never go out. It is known for ponies, for lying nearest to Kaishon, and for watching the Barerk Whalers uneasily. Its direction is RISING, because every trader coming west from the Pony Gate passes its gate first, though the Whalers' new Harpoon-Master has made the coast less sure.

The town. The Fevur Hall holds the clan's Hearth-Stone and a Kaishoni bronze bell, bought, the clan says, from a Barerk crew after the sack of Shanyo in 763; it is kept out of sight when Kaishoni traders visit. The Pony Fields around the palisade are fenced winter pastures where ponies are bred, broken and sold. The Trade Yard inside the east gate is where goods are packed for the Pony Gate, and the scales weigh hacksilver against tsinkya. The Pony Gate itself belongs to Kaishon: a small fortified gate in the Rampart's northern line, two nights east, where Kaishoni officers take a fifth of the worth of everything coming in, as at the Jade Gate, and admit only licensed traders.

Life and trade. Fevstel eats rye bread, mutton, elk and coast fish and, since 1144, rice, which the old refuse. The young drink Shanyo tea, which the storm priests call southern water. Ponies, furs, ivory and amber go east; tea, rice, cloth and iron pots come west. A Fevur pony costs thirty marks' weight, a chest of Shanyo tea five, and a cup of mead a tenth. The town argues about the Whalers, Kaishoni goods and the Sun-Turner lamp. In Hamul, the Sixth Month, after the salmon, it holds the Pony Fair, and Kaishoni officers come from the Pony Gate to look.

People. Kaulthar the Lamp-Keeper (kaulthar, "light") keeps the Sun-Turner lamp on the Fevur coast, a charge she had from her mother. A tall, gray-eyed woman of about forty, she comes to Fevstel twice a year for oil and grain, and is served in the hall because Selra suffers her. Bekil the Harpoon-Master is the man Fevstel watches.

Hooks. - Bekil has asked to buy fifty Fevur ponies, and nobody knows what whalers want with ponies. - The storm priests want Kaulthar's lamp put out, and Selra needs the grain the Sun-Turners bring. The Fevur stelest must choose whom to disappoint. - A Kaishoni officer at the Pony Fair asked how many longships Clan Fevur could crew, and said he was only curious. - A Shanyo tea trader has seen the bell in the Fevur Hall and known its maker's mark.

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Town · Hrodvald · about 600 people

Lenrik lies on the western road nine nights past Ironjaw Hold, where the land rises toward the northern tail of the Spine and the road to Nugvek begins to climb. The town takes its name from the tall gray stone on its green, for lenrik is the Hrodvaldr word for a standing stone. Around it huddle a few dozen turf-roofed longhouses, a small hall, and a palisade mended so often that no two stakes match. The wind off the mountains never quite stops.

At a glance. Lenrik belongs to Clan Ironjaw, and one of Kruman's sworn men keeps it for him under the clan's reldith. It has a low palisade and nothing else. It lives on rye, sheep, hounds, and the travelers of the western road: Nugag traders bound for Krasvuv, Dunmorrow iron-sellers, Vargate timber-men and, since 1144, men of other clans going to Kruman. It keeps the Old Ones strictly, as Kruman does. It is known for its stone, and as the last Ironjaw town before Nugag land. Its direction is CONTESTED, because it sits on the line between the north's two strongest chieftains, and both are waiting.

The town. The Lenrik Stone stands on the green, three times a man's height, with Storm-Runes cut low on every face and worn smooth by hands. The old tales say it marks the boundary set between Ironjaw and Nugag after an old feud, and Nugag says it once stood a day farther east. The Lenrik Hall is a small longhouse with Kruman's iron jaw painted on its gable, where his sworn man sits. The Guest Barn beside it refuses nobody, after Kruman's example, and every guest pays in news. The Spine Road leaves the west gate and climbs over the pass toward Nugvek, a hard ten nights; snow shuts the pass in Thubor and opens it in Bryrso.

Life and trade. Lenrik eats rye bread, mutton, cheese and whatever the hunters bring, and drinks ale. Its hounds go to Ironjaw Hold, and wool and hides go down the road. It argues about Kruman and Selra, and about which clan the men in the Guest Barn truly belong to. A loaf of rye bread costs a tenth of a mark's weight and a hound pup five. Its own custom is the Stone Oath: each year after the ice breaks in Bryrso, the elders of Lenrik and of the nearest Nugag steads lay their hands on the runes and swear that the boundary stands where it stands.

People. Stelest Kruman Ironjaw (55) holds Lenrik from Ironjaw Hold and has not come to it since 1144, but his sworn man keeps his peace to the letter. Judurn the Hound-Master comes from the hold each spring to choose pups, and Thuba Nugag's traders pass through every month.

Hooks. - The Nugag elders did not come to the Stone Oath this year, for the first time anyone remembers. - A Nugag trader has been found dead on the Spine Road, and his kin are asking Ironjaw for drolak before the snow shuts the pass. - A storm priest says the oldest rune on the stone is no Storm-Rune at all, and has asked Statha the Far-Seer to come and touch it. - Men in the Guest Barn with no clan marks said they were going to Ironjaw Hold, then took the Spine Road west.

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Fortress · Kaishon · about 25,000 people, 15,000 of them soldiers

From the Grass Sea the Jade Gate looks like a hill someone has cut square. The road from Tolmar-Buyor follows the Tsanha across the steppe, and the wall rises out of the grass as a gray line and then as a cliff, with the gate-fortress standing astride the river. Kites fly from the towers all day, and the first thing a caravan sees is the Rampart Squatters' market in the ditch below, which Kaishon does not admit is there.

At a glance. The Jade Gate belongs to the Long Rampart's command under General Dezau Honmyan, who keeps no fixed seat but is here more than anywhere. Its walls are the Rampart's, rammed earth faced with brick, and no one has ever breached them. It lives on the garrison's rice, Rampart soy and paddy eel, and on the Tsanha Crossing: the ministry takes a fifth of the worth of all goods coming in and admits only licensed caravans. Its faith is the Doctrine, and the conscripts keep the Kin. Its direction is CONTESTED, because Sarsak Tolmar wants the gate opened for trade, Makok wants it shut, and the man who holds the keys answers to neither.

The town. The River Arch carries the wall over the Tsanha and is closed at night by a bronze-bound grille. Every barge is stopped, searched and registered there, and at the transfer quay beside it Drift cargo moves to Kaishoni barges for Kokrin; a Drift barge goes on east only with a license. The Hall of the Fifth is the customs hall, where clerks who never smile value goods and check licenses. The Kite Tower is the first station of the signal line to Kokrin's Kite Terrace, and its crews also read the wall's kites north and south. The Ditch Market, outside in the Rampart Ditch, is where Squatters, Nintang half-bloods and tribute drovers trade with anyone. The garrison buys there and reports nothing.

Life and trade. The garrison gambles on crickets it is not supposed to have. Glass, medicine, wool cloth, wine and clockwork come in; silk, tea, porcelain and lacquer go out, and each spring the tribute caravan passes with its silver, silk and thousand chests of tea. A caravan license costs a mihomau, a bowl of rice with eel a twentieth of a tsinkya, and a conscript earns a tenth of a tsinkya a day in notes, with rice. On the Rampart Muster, the 1st of Yasâuchên, the beacons come in along the wall from both ends and meet at the Jade Gate's tower, which sends the fire east to Kokrin.

People. General Dezau Honmyan (48) has spent twenty-six years on the wall. Shèntà the Gate-Captain (shèntà, "shield"), an examined officer of about forty-five, thin, bald and exact, commands the gate's garrison under him and has not lost a license in nine years.

Hooks. - An Empty Bowl monk is walking the Rampart from the north, and two thousand conscripts will be behind him when he reaches the gate. - A Drift orphan has been found in a rice sack on an eastbound barge at the River Arch. - Sarsak Tolmar is riding for the gate under a white banner on the day Princess Seitotai comes to ask Dezau for his army, with Makok's messengers an hour behind. - Shèntà has noticed that the Kite Tower sent a message to Kokrin that was never entered in its log.

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Fortress · Kaishon · about 9,000 people, 7,000 of them soldiers

The road from Tsenkin runs west ten days, out of the mountains and across thin frontier farmland, and ends at the Iron Gate. The gate-fortress is built on the Dominion's pattern, the size of a hill, a square brick gatehouse on a stone base, but its great doors are seldom opened. Past it the northern Grass Sea runs gray-green to the sky. Rampart hawks nest in every tower and scream over the wall all summer at nothing the sentries can see.

At a glance. The Iron Gate belongs to the Long Rampart's command under General Dezau Honmyan. It is the northern of the Rampart's two great gates, where the road from Tsenkin reaches the wall. It admits no caravans, since only the Jade Gate is licensed for trade, so it lives on the garrison and the engineering corps. It is the Rampart's northern armory, where repeating crossbows are made and mended. Its faith is the Doctrine, and the conscripts keep the Kin. It is known for its bolts, its hawks and its shut doors. Its direction is STABLE: nothing has come through it in a generation, but the Cherüsh are testing the wall, and the Open Gate would like this to be the second gate opened.

The town. The Great Doors are two leaves of timber sheathed in iron plates, which give the gate its name. They open only for the army, and have opened three times in twenty years. The Wicket is a small door cut into the south leaf, through which Rampart Squatters come in each morning to sell eggs, felt and fodder, and go out each evening. The Bolt Works in the lee of the wall are long brick sheds where engineering-corps smiths make repeating crossbows, bolts and springs for the multi-bolt engines of the whole northern wall. The Hawk Towers north and south of the gate carry the Muster beacons and the hawks' nests. The Ox Road behind the wall carries stone and bolts to the towers behind teams of Rampart oxen.

Life and trade. The Iron Gate eats rice, Rampart soy and paddy eel, and the soldiers grow cabbages between the sheds. It argues about the Cherüsh, about pay, and about the Open Gate. A conscript earns a tenth of a tsinkya a day in notes, with rice, a Bolt Works smith a tsinkya and a half, and a Squatter's egg costs a twentieth of a tsinkya at the Wicket. On the Rampart Muster, the 1st of Yasâuchên, the Hawk Towers take the fire from the north and pass it south toward the Jade Gate, and the garrison cheers when it comes.

People. General Dezau Honmyan (48) inspects the gate each spring and summer. Several of the Squatters who use the Wicket are his scouts, which he denies.

Hooks. - Riders of the Horde have watched the Great Doors from the steppe for three days, never nearer than a crossbow shot. - The Bolt Works have been ordered to double what they make, under a seal that may or may not be the Emperor's. - An Empty Bowl monk passed through on his walk south with three hundred conscripts behind him, and the gate's commander let them go. - The Open Gate merchants of Chaiyo have asked the general what it would cost to make the Iron Gate a market, and the Squatters say the Nintang would come.

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Camps · Uusung · about 5,000 people in some twenty camps

North of the Frostmarch the land ends in a white shelf, and on it, and on the sea ice past it in winter, the Uusung camps move with the seasons. A traveler who reaches them sees first the reindeer, a brown smudge on the snow, then the low domes of hide tents banked with snow, a single thread of smoke from a seal-oil lamp, and dogs. The camps are nearly silent. When the Uusung speak to the dead they use a long voice, a held and rising call that carries farther than any shout, and Hrodvald who have heard it on the ice do not forget it.

At a glance. Each camp is ruled by its eldest, who judges its quarrels; there is no chief over all the camps. There are no walls. The camps live on seal, reindeer, walrus, whale in its season, and fox, and trade furs and ivory for iron needles and knives. They honor the spirits of beasts, above all the frost bear, and the Northern Lights, which they say are the dead walking home along the sky. The Uusung are the people who stayed behind to keep the door open for them. Their own name means "the Door." They have no writing and no count of years; a person is as old as the Long Darks they remember. They are known for knowing what lies north of the ice. The Uusung's direction is STABLE: their numbers do not change and their camps move as they always have, but the south has begun to come north, and one of their own has gone south and not come back.

Life and trade. The Uusung keep seven seasons of uneven length, named for what the camps hunt: Mirgaq (the Long Dark), Punrul (sea ice), Kaanuna (seal), Vuktaqsing (reindeer), Malnaanvaq (whale), Jaannul (walrus) and Hisurit (fox). The year begins at the Long Dark Vigil. They hunt seal and walrus from one-man skin boats, and whales in Malnaanvaq from big open skin boats that carry a camp's hunters, and they herd Farrur reindeer across the tundra in summer. They eat seal, reindeer, walrus and fish, and in hard years boil tundra lichen into a bitter soup. No Uusung hunts the frost bear that was once a man, and every child is told which bear he is. The worst sentence a camp's eldest can give is to be left behind when the camp moves. A good iron knife buys a walrus tusk from an Uusung hunter, and that tusk is worth ten marks' weight on the Hinrell at Krasvuv.

People. Lilvuq of the Long Dark (perhaps 60) has spoken the names of the dead at the Vigil for forty years, and once guided Statha the Far-Seer north of the ice. Jaamang (20), his granddaughter, has gone south to Krasvuv and been told to come home. Statha the Far-Seer (80s) is the only Hrodvald who speaks their tongue. The eldest of the other camps go unnamed here.

Hooks. - Lilvuq is dying and has sent word south for Jaamang. The message waits with the Qaflan at Krasvuv, who have not found her. - Selra has asked Statha what lies north of the ice, and Statha has said she will tell only if Selra goes to see it. - A Hrodvald trader has come to the Last Fire asking for a guide north, with more iron than any camp has ever seen.

The camps. Some twenty camps spread along the Pale Waste, each named for its place. Five of them are told of here.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is Lilvuq's camp, about forty people, and the smallest of the named camps. It winters on the shore near where the Farvig Outflow reaches the sea, and it is the only camp the others come to. Every year, on the first night the sun fails to rise, most often in the Ninth Month of the Reckoning, every Uusung camp meets here for the Long Dark Vigil. The eldest of each camp walks out onto the ice to a flat, bare stretch the Uusung call the Names Ground, and in the long voice speaks the names of that year's dead to the Lights, so that they can find the door. For forty years Lilvuq has spoken the Long Dark's names and taught them to no one but Jaamang, who has learned half the list and gone south with it. For the one night of the Vigil the camp holds hundreds of people and more dogs than anyone can count. The next morning the camps leave, and the Long Dark is forty people again. If Lilvuq dies before Jaamang comes home, no one living knows the Long Dark's names.

The Whale Bones

The Whale Bones is a coast camp on a shingle beach where the skeletons of stranded and hunted whales lie in the snow, some older than anyone's memory. Its people build their winter houses on frames of whale ribs, roofed with hides and banked with turf and snow, and they call the camp's winter ground the Rib Houses. It is the whaling camp of the Waste. In Malnaanvaq its hunters launch the big skin boats before the other camps, and the Barerk Whalers learned the open whaleboat from Uusung like them. Some of the Whale Bones' families have kin among the Whalers on the Barerk coast, and they say Bekil the Harpoon-Master's Uusung half comes from their beach, which he has never denied. The Whale Bones trades baleen and walrus ivory to the Whalers for iron, and gets more for them than any camp that trades with the Hrodvald.

The Blue Ice

The Blue Ice is the camp nearest the glaciers, where old ice comes down to the shelf in a wall that shines blue at its cracks. Its people herd more reindeer than any other camp, taking them inland across the tundra in Vuktaqsing and back to the ice edge in winter, and they cut drinking water from the glacier instead of melting sea ice. The Ice Wall behind the camp groans and drops blocks into the sea in summer, and the Blue Ice children are taught to read its cracks. The camp's hunters trap the white fox in Hisurit, and much of the fur that reaches the Hrodvald from the far north began here. The Blue Ice elders say the glacier has drawn back a long walk since their grandmothers' time, and that the ice is giving back things it took.

The Last Fire

The Last Fire stands where the last scrub willow and driftwood of the south give out; past it the only fuel is seal oil. It is the southernmost of the camps and the one the Hrodvald know best. Hunters going out onto the sea ice in Punrul light their last wood fire here, and the camp takes its name from that custom. Hrodvald fur traders and a few Deep Cold come as far as the Last Fire and seldom farther. The Uusung think the Deep Cold who go naked onto the ice at midwinter are mad, but they are polite about it. Jaamang walked south from the Last Fire. The camp's eldest, an old woman, once guided a lost Hrodvald trader back to the Farvig road and still carries the knife he gave her for it. It is at the Last Fire that iron needles and knives change hands for furs and ivory, and the camp is richer in iron than any other, and more uneasy about it.

The Door

The Door is the northernmost of the camps, on the far edge of the shelf, and it bears the name the Uusung give themselves. Its people say they keep the watch for the dead walking home along the Lights, and that the door itself lies north of the ice, past their camp. Few outsiders have reached it. Statha the Far-Seer passed through it with Lilvuq on the way north and came back changed, and she will not say what she saw. The Door's elders do not speak of what lies north of them to other camps, and they have never spoken of it to a Hrodvald. They keep a place at the camp's northern edge that they call the Watching Place, where someone sits through every night of Mirgaq facing north. The tale of the Builders' Door says the Uusung know where a door of the Age of Ruins lies, and of all the Uusung, the Door's people would know best.