What the World Depends On
No city in the Known World can feed, arm, light, and equip itself. Every one holds something the others cannot make, and every one needs something it cannot produce. The arrangement has held the world together for nine centuries, and nobody designed it.
Who needs whom
- Forgegate
- Holds the ground — every overland route passes the Neck and pays for it — and two things nobody else can make: precision clockwork at scale, and pure Blaenda.
- Stormharbor
- Holds Kravoe, the whole of the world's fine machinery, from one whaling fleet that sails once a year.
- Clearhold
- Holds Glaenith, which lights every street, archive, surgical theater, and endoscope in the world; Shilkra; and the archive every physicians' guild consults.
- Eldershore
- Holds Zhael, the Aruna, the finest harbor anywhere, and the paper that settles most of the world's trade.
- Shining Reach
- Holds the best farmland in the north and the Academy, which trains most senior physicians and publishes the reasoning everyone else argues with.
- The Iron Coves
- Hold the sea lanes and nothing else, which is precisely enough.
What breaks when a link breaks
- Forgegate closes the roads
- It has happened, and it produced the Pact. Overland trade stops entirely. Clearhold goes hungry within a season. Stormharbor loses its market for Kravoe and Fleisk at once. Freight rates double within a month and every hull in the world is suddenly worth more. Forgegate itself loses more than anyone, since a city that lives on traffic and stops the traffic has cut its own throat. This is why the roads have closed exactly once in living memory and why nobody threatens it lightly.
- Stormharbor loses a whaling season
- Ice comes early, the grounds yield nothing, or a storm takes four ships in a week. Kravoe does not run out, because every city holds barrels against it, but the price triples and repairmen ration it; Forgegate's guilds buy first at whatever it costs. By the second failed season instruments across the world run badly, and nobody has ever seen a third.
- Glaenith stops coming down the mountain
- Street lighting goes dark first, since surgical theaters and archives are supplied before boulevards. Stormharbor suffers worst, having built its city on a light that cannot be blown out, and finds itself burning oil it would rather be selling.
- The Long Reach becomes impassable
- A season of unusual piracy, a war, or a run of bad weather. Traffic goes the long way around by Clearhold, Aruna and Zhael reach the north late and dear, Eldershore's warehouses fill, and the Coves prosper for exactly as long as it lasts. This is the choke the world can absorb, and the reason it prices insurance rather than fighting a war about it.