Nothing on Stair Street rolls. A visitor notices it by ear before eye: carts stop at the lower road, past the dark middens, and from there the hill is boots on stone, the scrape of porters' baskets, a long staircase of complaint. Quillmarch is a walled trading city of about forty thousand, packed behind two miles of gray limestone wall on a hill where the Tolle bends twice. It is always awake. Its smoke stands over the chimneys as a brown cap, and carters on the salt road steer by it half a day out.
The locals tell it this way: the city wakes at the command of the east gate. The doors swing open the instant the sun clears the limestone shelf, and every shutter on the hillside answers in one clap, some four hundred of them, which throws the pigeons off the slate roofs. A householder who opens a shutter early is called a morning thief, and for a season his neighbors will not lend him peat. The city runs on grain, peat, firewood and river water, and none of it arrives before the gate does, so the rule is kept with some fervor. Departing travelers press a coin edge-first into the crack of the weathered oak left post, for luck on the road. The crack glints with them, and boys with knives work out the loose ones after dark.
There are smaller customs, mostly petty. The two lamplighters of Stair Street, a man named Rusk and a woman who goes unnamed in his hearing, have not agreed in years whose duty it is to carry the ladder back to the chapter house. It leans against the same iron post, sooty at the top, until someone trips on it. The chapter house itself, a squat building with a stepped roof, keeps one tall window lit at the top all night. Residents of the streets below argue over whose oil it burns. Outside the wall, the low patched-roof streets by the river, Lunt Row and Kerf Lane, keep their own hours and ignore the gate entirely, which the walled streets take as an insult.
The locals get the order of things wrong. I watched from the top of the east wall tower on six mornings, with the doors below me and the hillside spread inland. The shutters do not answer the gate. The shutters on the lower slope go first, a ragged volley, and the gatekeepers, who can hear them from inside the arch, swing the doors afterward. The gate follows the hill, and the hill will not hear of it. I timed the gap with a pocket watch, starting at the first bang of a shutter and stopping when the light spilled through the arch onto the cobbles. Over six mornings it never fell below nine seconds and never ran past fourteen.
- Classification
- Walled river-bend trading city
- Habitat
- River bends, salt roads, limestone shelves
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- about 40,000 residents behind 2 miles of wall
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Places and Worlds
- Binomial
- Urbs murata
- Diet
- Grain, peat, firewood, river water
- Temperament
- Crowded, wary, quick to bargain