Caldmere

Caldmere is the capital of Varrow and was the seat of its emperors; it is now, and has been for fifteen years, the seat of a Regency that governs 'until the Crown returns'. The city stands where the river Sull bends south through the lake-country, a day's ride by the old imperial road from the edge of the Glassmere, though few travellers take that road willingly. It is a grey city of slate roofs and narrow market streets, built on a low hill above the river, walled in dressed stone that the Empire raised and the Regency cannot afford to mend. On clear nights the Wound is visible above its rooftops, as it is everywhere; the citizens have ceased, by all accounts, to look up at it.

Geography and fabric

The city is joined to its south bank by a stone toll-bridge whose gate the watch still calls the Amber Gate, for the weathered amber bosses set into its arch. Above the bridge, on the hill, stands the Hall of Seven Hearths, the squat council keep where the seven houses meet; beside it the Mint strikes coins that still bear the face of Corvan IV, dead these fifteen years, because no house will vote to change the die and no one wishes to ask the question plainly. The old imperial quarter below the hall is a melancholy place: triumphal pillars put to use holding up fish-stalls and washing-lines, a proclamation wall layered in paper no one reads, and shrines to the old gods whose lamps have not been lit since the Sundering, though passers-by still touch the doorposts out of habit. The Parchmarket, once a grain and parchment market, is where the city's real business is now done — the sale of offices, the trading of debts, and the quiet purchase of votes.

The river smells of tannin and barge-pitch. In Mistmonth the fog comes off the Sull before dawn and the city keeps its lamps burning until mid-morning; the lamplighters' guild is one of the few civic bodies still punctually paid.

History

Caldmere was a provincial river-town before the Empire made it a capital, and it has never quite grown into the dignity; it is too small for its titles and too proud of them. It survived the Sundering untouched — the glass stopped twenty miles short — and for that reason it has always been suspected, unfairly, of luck bought somewhere. In 297 AS the last emperor, Corvan IV, died here without an heir, and in the sack-riot of the following year it was Edric Ardent, then a middle-aged lord of no great reputation, who held the Amber Gate against the looters with his own household men. He has ruled since as Lord Regent, and the city's quiet, such as it is, is largely his work: the arrangement of pensions and favours remembered as the Quiet Compact was struck in Caldmere's taverns and counting-rooms, not in its council hall.

The archive records the Almoners' Riot of recent years as the moment the quiet cracked: a bread protest put down not by the city watch — some two hundred men, paid in arrears — but by the household soldiers of Brant Halloway. Since the autumn of 311 AS the Council has not met in full, awaiting the Lord Regent's death, and since the new year a factor of the Saverrine banks has sat in the hall itself, by right of the Regency's debts, watching. The full account of the succession quarrel belongs to the chronicle of the Regency Crisis; here it is enough to say that Caldmere is a city waiting for a death, and everyone in it knows whose.

Life there today

Forty thousand souls, perhaps, though the count is old and the Long Winter thinned the poorer quarters. The city lives on the river: grain and salt come up by barge from the League's factors, wool and timber go down, and the bargemen of the Sull are a guild apart, blunt-spoken and exempt from most tolls by charters no one dares test. Food in the markets is dearer than it was: rye bread, river fish, kale, and the thin beer the locals call small-sour. Ashcraft is legal in Caldmere but mistrusted; the Hollowed find little custom among the respectable, though the archive notes that discreet house calls are made in the better quarters after dark, and paid for in coin that does not pass through the Parchmarket.

Since the winter of 311 AS the Lord Regent's sister Maud Ardent has carried his seal and read his letters aloud, and petitioners now wait on her patience as once they waited on his. The Pale Choir keeps a mission-house by the north gate — its offer of intercession over the city's debts having been twice refused — and the Lantern-Wardens keep a small contract-house near the bridge, busier since the risings in the north. The two houses do not acknowledge one another.

Rumours

• That the empty eighth chair in the Hall of Seven Hearths has been found, on certain mornings, pushed back from the table, though the hall is locked at night.
• That the Mint's oldest dies were cut from metal taken from the broken Sundered Crown — a tale the Mint denies and the Crown-men repeat.
• That House Halloway has offered to pay the watch's arrears in full, and that the watch is divided on whether that would be a kindness or a purchase.
• That Grey Pilgrims have been seen on the western road in greater numbers, passing the city by without entering it, as they pass everything.

Caldmere is a door held shut by an old man's hand, and the whole Reach is leaning on the other side of it.