Saverra

Saverra stands at the southern end of the Reach where the coast turns east, the first city of the Tidebound League and, by its own account, the only one that matters. It is a steep place: the harbour lies in a hook of grey water between two headlands, and the city climbs above it in terraces of pale stone and red tile, so that from the roads inland a traveller sees first the roofs, then the masts, then nothing but sea. The archive has measured its harbour-lamps from a League toll-book of 308 AS, which counts three hundred and forty lamps lit each night along the quays — more light, the toll-keeper notes sourly, than the whole of Caldmere burns in a winter.

It is an old city by southern reckoning. Saverra was a walled market under the emperors, paying its dues up the coast roads to Varrow, until the years between 140 and 162 AS when the Tidebound cities bought their freedom with loans — a phrase the Saverrines use with great precision, since it was largely their own coin that bought it. The charter of the League is still kept, by custom, in a chest of black oak beneath the council hall, and the city's charter-council meets above it, in a room whose windows look down on the harbour as if to remind the banking houses where their money floats.

The city and its quarters

The lower town is all quay and warehouse: salt-fish hung on racks until the gulls give up on it, casks of southern wine, bales of steppe-wool off the Khaddan caravans that come down through the border marches, and the smell of tar, brine and lamp-oil over everything. Above it sit the counting-houses — the House of Morel and the Saverrine Vaults chief among them — and above those, on the windy crown of the city, the old imperial citadel, its walls black with age, now a granary and a debtors' prison. Between the quays and the counting-houses runs the Long Stair of the city, a stepped street of some two hundred treads where porters carry everything that cannot go by cart, and where a newcomer learns on the first day that Saverra is built for mules and creditors, not for comfort.

The houses of the rich are shuttered and plain-fronted, their wealth kept indoors; the houses of the poor lean together over alleys where the plague-houses are marked, in bad years, with a red lamp over the door. Saverra has known ship-borne sickness more often than any city in the Reach — the League's ledgers record outbreaks in 271, 288 and 305 AS — and the Saverrines have made a cold science of quarantine, burning the bedding of the dead and fining captains who lie about their ports of call.

The Collegium and the Hollowed

Saverra is the one city in the Reach where ashcraft is treated simply as a trade: licensed, taxed and argued over like any other cargo, with no priest at the practitioner's elbow and no questions asked about what a client burns. In Varrow the Hollowed are legal but watched and mistrusted; in the Pale See they serve the Choir as Ash-Clerics. In Saverra they serve the market, and the Collegium of Ash, housed in a former monastery behind the council hall, keeps the rolls, sets the fees and hears disputes between practitioners and their clients. The Collegium also keeps its own measures of the Wound, taken nightly from the citadel roof, and does not open its ledgers to outsiders — a reticence the Pale Choir resents loudly and imitates quietly. Accounts differ on what the ledgers contain; the archive has no record of any outsider reading them.

The Collegium's rivalry with the Choir is the quiet war of the southern cities. Choir missions come south every few years to preach that a burned memory is an offering to the Wound; the Collegium answers that it is a transaction, like any other, and should be taxed accordingly. The Saverrines, who would tax rain if the charter allowed, find the Collegium's position the more congenial.

Money, debts and the present hour

Saverra lends to everyone. The Regency in Caldmere is the city's largest debtor, and with Lord Regent Edric Ardent dying and the succession question unresolved, the charter-houses have begun in this year of 312 AS to call in loans that have run comfortably for decades. What Saverra wants in return is not land — the League has never wanted land — but signatures: concessions on river tolls, on coinage, on the garrisoning of mercenary companies along Varrow's southern roads. Men who know the counting-houses say the city's patience is shorter than its memory, which is long.

In Saverra they do not ask whether you are honest. They ask whether you are good for it.

Above the city

A note for the antiquarian. The headland above the western quay is turf over outcrops of a dark green-black stone, too hard for the local tools, which the quarrymen leave alone. Surveyors who have walked the Drowned Coast remark that it is the nearest known stone of the kind to the green-black treads of the Stair of Ilm, which matches no rock of that coast. What a Saverran headland and a drowned western stair have in common, the archive cannot say; the quarrymen, sensibly, say nothing at all.