The House

An ordinary household in a city keeps things a person from a comparable age in our world would not recognize: running water, a cold cabinet, a washing machine, and light that does not need a flame. None of it is remarkable in Teraell. All of it is thought to require looking after.

The Four Lights

Oil: What most people light their houses with — a brass or bronze lamp with a clockwork wick adjuster and a polished reflector, in every home, workshop, and tavern. Second-pressing Oevrei is the ordinary fuel. Above it is Kravoe, which is itself two oils: the head oil burns bright white with almost no smell and is the only lubricant fine clockwork will tolerate; the body oil is darker, cheaper, and smells like what it is. Kravoe proper is the most valuable cargo by weight after Zhael, so a house burning it in the parlor is making a point, and most of it never reaches a lamp because every clockmaker needs it first. Oil is also the only light anybody carries.
Gas: Where a city has laid it, which means the northern cities: small local works and limited piped systems, brighter and cleaner than oil. Shining Reach runs it through its grand squares; Forgegate values it in workshops, where better light means fewer accidents.
Glaenith: The light-stone, ground and sealed into a Kwaenith, glowing for months and then refilled — cheap to buy and never done paying. An even white light that does not blow out, freeze, need tending, or set fire to anything, so it lights streets, academies, libraries, and the rooms of people who do not think about cost. Stormharbor lights its whole city with it. See Glaenith.
Nyvlaem — the living light: A sealed culture in a Kyvlaem that feeds itself and glows without refilling, softly and warmly. Every one was divided from another and all go back to Eldershore. It is a plant before it is a lamp — a culture that gives useful light has roots to match, and a Kyvlaem is furniture, sited in the shared space of a compound where it lights what everyone uses. The economics run backwards from everything else: expensive once, and then it feeds itself, the only light in the world a household pays for once. Ground is the harder half, since a family in two rooms has nowhere to put one. It dies north of the Frostline, so Stormharbor, Forgegate, and Shining Reach have never had it; Clearhold keeps it at an altitude that should not permit it, by careful attention, to make the point that it can.

The Roelwym

A city's street lighting, lit by Kwaenith or Kyvlaem according to climate and treasury, and a serious municipal expense either way. How far the lights reach is one of the most obvious ways to tell how a city is doing. A main way lit end to end is a statement; a main way lit for half its length is a different one, and everybody walking the dark half understands it.

Marking light

Not everything that glows is meant to light anything. The Glaera's light compound, harvested from abandoned webs, becomes a paint for watch dials, instrument faces, trail markers, and a physician's night light — telling you where something is, for years, without being fed or lit. See Dangerous Fauna and Flora#What is taken from them.

Water

Every settlement has running water, cities and Roedhavens alike, through brass pipes by compact steam pump or by gravity. Toilets are universal, fixed, trapped, and drained to the underground waste; a city that could not manage that would not be much of a city. Most homes have water at several points; whether privy and bathing room share a room is a question of space. A shower needs a header tank on the roof and a structure to hold it, which is a matter of owning the building. A rented room has water near it rather than in it — a tap on the landing, a shared privy, a queue first thing in the morning. Clearhold has the best supply, Eldershore the most sophisticated storage, Stormharbor a dry-summer problem, and the Coves mismatched piping that works.

Cold

A cold cabinet is a necessity, and which kind a house has says what the house is. Most keep an icebox, an insulated chest that needs ice delivered; the ice seller's cart is a fixture of the week and nobody is embarrassed by it. Wealthy homes, taverns, and markets have mechanical units driven by compact steam engines — in Shining Reach a quiet status object in polished brass and paneled wood; in Eldershore, where heat spoils everything, wanted more than anywhere and priced accordingly.

Heat

One fire, and how much of the house it reaches is a matter of what has been built around it.

The stove sits against an interior wall rather than an outside one, because the flue gives off heat all the way up and wasting that would be absurd. The room above the stove is the warm bedroom, and a grate in the floor or an open stair does the rest. Which rooms are warm is simply a fact a family arranges itself around: the baby sleeps over the stove, the oldest person has the best place, and somebody gets the back room and knows it.

The serious version is a masonry stove. A heavy mass of Maerga with the flue winding back and forth inside it, so the stone takes up the heat and gives it back for hours after the fire is out. A bench along one side that everybody sits on, and in the best of them a sleeping shelf on top at about waist height — the warmest surface in the house, and where the oldest person in it sleeps. Northern families argue about the shelf.

Above that the ladder runs. A working household has one stove and the room above it. A master's house has a masonry stove with ducts in the walls, warm air rising through them and cool air falling back, circulating on nothing but the difference in temperature. A merchant's townhouse has a boiler in the cellar and piped heat throughout, which warms rooms nobody is sitting in.

Everything moves by heat rising, because there is no pump anywhere in the world. One consequence is worth knowing: the top of a northern house is the warmest part of it, and the good bedrooms are upstairs. In Eldershore, where nothing needs heating, the top floor is the one nobody wants.

What a well-off household has that a poor one does not is regulation as much as warmth. A clockwork valve working against a bimetallic strip holds a room at a temperature. A timer opens the valve and strikes the igniter before the fourth bell, so the house is warm before anybody is up. There is a gauge on the wall reading in Deigr (degrees), because everything in this world has a gauge on it.

Stormharbor and Clearhold think about all of this more than anybody. Eldershore has almost none of it, and finds a northern kitchen in Endwr oppressive.

Machines that do work

Washing machines are common — steam-assisted or crank-driven drums owned by most working and middle-class households; only the very poor and the remote wash by hand. Dryers and dishwashers are luxuries in a house and common outside one, in laundry houses that run all day. Stove-feeders add fuel on a timer. In workshops, automata turn lathes and work bellows, freeing a craftsman for the part that requires him. On the Frontier they matter most — wood-cutters, seed drills, small harvesters — and a Roedhaven keeps its automata in better repair than a city household, because the city household can buy another.

Machines that do not

Automata also exist purely to be admired: small dancers, animated birds, music boxes, mechanical dolls, galloping horses for children. Nobody apologizes for these; a thing made beautifully is art. There is one place the money goes the other way. For refined service a wealthy household wants a person — tea poured by a trained slave, music played by one, a room attended by somebody who knows the forms — because the service is the point, and a mechanism doing the same motion is performing a motion. So the finest houses have the fewest machines in their principal rooms and the most in their kitchens and cellars.