Fire and Emergency
When the Solarm goes — the cry or bell that calls a city out — the cities answer in the way each answers everything. A Kalnain is a thing that cannot wait, and every city has decided who comes when it happens.
The fire brigade
An Igevra is a fire brigade, and who mans one differs by city. In Forgegate the guilds keep them, as they keep everything. In Shining Reach it is the Senate's men. In Eldershore the lineage halls turn out for their own quarters. In Clearhold the Registrars run it, and record it. In Stormharbor it is whoever is ashore when the bell goes, which in the sailing months is not many.
The Iron Coves do it differently, as they do everything. A building carries an Igmeich, a fire mark — a plaque saying its protection has been paid for. An unmarked building burns while the brigade stands in the street. They will wet down a marked neighbor to keep the fire from spreading to it, which everybody understands and nobody thanks them for. No other city uses the mark.
The engine
The Igradirt is the fire cart: a small boiler on a cart, drawn by a Dorath team, with leather Takla — hose — and brass couplings. Forgegate builds the best of them and argues about the coupling thread. It draws from a Tundo, a valved standpipe on a water main opened with a key. Forgegate has the most of them, being the densest city in the world and full of forges. Clearhold records the pressure at each one.
The ambulance
A Kanome is a sprung cart with a covered bed that carries the hurt to a physician — leather springs, a Dorath team, and an attendant who is not a physician but has been trained to stop bleeding, splint a limb, and do no harm on the road. They are kept where injuries are predictable: quays, workshop quarters, mine heads, building sites, and the Summer Games. Everywhere else somebody runs.
See also
- Vice and Crime — the Watch · The House#Water · Medicine · Sport