Caloryn

The Dromedary Gate of the East

Silver built Caloryn; dromedaries rule it. The city rose in the second wave of expansion as the northern anchor of the silver country, and the old wealth is still there in its bones — milky quartz spoil in the road-beds, the irregular wall tracing the lip of worked-out pits, the counting house where the ore was once tallied. But the easy veins are long exhausted, and the Rynnic great houses discovered generations ago that the desert pays better on the hoof: Caloryn is where the dromedary was first domesticated, and a beast of proven Rynnic pedigree now changes hands for more than a season of ore ever did. The old silver counting house is the House of Pedigrees today, its ledgers tracking bloodlines rather than bullion — which the aristocracy finds neither ironic nor sentimental. Ledgers are ledgers.

The Two Cities

There are really two Caloryns. Inside the wall stands the compact stone core — warm grey gneiss, quartzite gates, the auction courts and training rings. Outside it spreads a settlement several times larger and forever in motion: noble breeding estates, circular felt dwellings, broad black-hair pavilions, and herds dispersed to nomad clients across the eastern range. The exhausted pits along the wall have been lined and flooded into reservoirs, and their stepped terraces are shaded by vast overlapping canopies of dromedary- and goat-hair cloth — a roof of woven desert stretched over water that the desert never intended to keep.

The Raid Gate

Caloryn is also the ugliest honesty in the Infernate's ledger: the staging ground for what slaving raids the state conducts in its own name. There is a gate in the wall called the Raid Gate, and it is called that by the people who use it. The Infernate long ago stopped pretending the raiders were local nomads — its neighbors never believed it, and the Creed does not consider the truth a thing to blush at. Captives seldom remain in Caloryn above a month; they are fed, watered, shaded and physicked with the same unsentimental care the great houses give their herds, and for the same reason, before the caravans take them west — gathering ore at Cinergis, and captured giants with it — down the long road to Merynon.

When they are not raiding, the Rynnic riders hunt: gazelle and desert hare by spear and sling, and now and again the stranger quarry that wanders north out of the Ashen Plains — beasts with fire or worse in them, whose hides and horns fetch sorcerers' prices in the markets of the south.