The Six City-States
Six cities hold the Known World. Everything between them is the Frontier. They share a technological framework and almost nothing else: every one has clockwork, capped steam, rifled firearms, and medicine better than any of them can account for; every one signed or refused the same Pact and lives with the same Oathbond. Beyond that they differ as completely as places can, and the differences are old enough that nobody remembers them being chosen.
The cities
| City | CLT name | Strength | Governance | In a line |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shining Reach | Shynreich | Character | Senate republic | The Academy, the Forum, the salon, and the intellectual center of every argument. |
| Forgegate | Foergaet | Skill | Guild council | Guilds, forges, two rivers, and the clockwork the whole world runs on. |
| Stormharbor | Stoermhavn | Will | The Thing | The harbor chain, the skalds, the whaling fleet, and the oil no clockwork runs without. |
| Eldershore | Eldwara | Line | Elder council | The oldest and largest city in the world, its finest harbor, and its recording houses. |
| Clearhold | Veisdra | Mind | Examination bureaucracy | A mountain valley that examines everything, including itself. |
| The Iron Coves | Aernkoev | Strength | None | Not a city-state in the same sense: a scattered outlaw archipelago that signed nothing. |
What they have in common
- Walls, and a margin
- Every city is walled or held by terrain. Every wall has a cleared and drained strip at its base, worked constantly, because the Slyngra never stops growing.
- An agricultural ring
- Four or five miles of defended farmland outside the walls, with roads running from every gate to a perimeter of drainage channels and watchtowers. Nothing is grown beyond a defended perimeter, and never has been. Past the watchtowers is the Frontier.
- Water and waste
- Steam-pumped water and underground waste, in every settlement down to the waystations. Quality varies; presence does not. Clearhold's water comes by gravity from the streams above; everyone else's by steam pump.
- Roelwym
- Street lighting on the main ways, lit by Kwaenith or Kyvlaem according to climate and wealth. How far a city's lights reach is the quickest way to judge how it is doing.
- Clockwork in the architecture
- Mechanisms on facades, clockwork gates and portcullises, difference engines in civic offices and counting houses. Forgegate makes much of it; everyone uses it.
- Slaves
- In every city, under the same Pact, marked the same way, and portable across all six borders. What differs is the density, the customs, and how loudly the argument is conducted. See Slavery and The Contested Ground.
What they do not
- Governance
- A senate, a guild council, a public assembly, an elder council, an examination bureaucracy, and whatever the Iron Coves has instead.
- Language, in small ways
- One Spraecha, six accents, and a good deal of local slang that does not travel. See Common Reason Tongue.
- Dress, music, building, and food
- The most visible differences and the ones a traveler notices first. They come from the founding cohorts, the survivors who taught them, and what nine centuries have made of both.
- Wealth, and what it rests on
- Every city has something the others need. None is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. See Economy and Trade.
Between them
- The Frontier — everything that is not the six cities
- The Roads — three overland routes, four sea lanes, and the Roedhavens that make them routes
- Roedskrin — the post, and how the world knows what the Frontier is doing
- Waendra · Fyndrecht · Aesloes — the people between the roads, the finder's right, and the strangers from nowhere
- Why Conquest Does Not Happen
The Iron Coves in detail
See also
- What Might Means — the six definitions of strength
- The Contested Ground#By city-state — where each city stands on slavery
- Meta:Cultural References — founding cohorts and aesthetic references (not in-world)