Cities, and Who They Answer To

Kworgalya has no empire. It has cities, and it has the arrangements cities make when they are too near to ignore and too far apart to swallow.

Those arrangements run in three steps: the city-state, the Alignment, and the Bloc. Every charted place sits somewhere along them, and where it sits tells you who taxes it, who marches when it is attacked, and how long either answer will hold.

What a City Actually Is

A city, in ordinary usage, is not the wall and the roofs inside it. It is an extended city-state: an urban core above ten thousand permanent residents, a substantial hinterland it genuinely administers, and rough self-sufficiency in what it cannot afford to import. Around twenty-five thousand is the point at which independence stops being a struggle and becomes a fact. Below it, a city survives on somebody's goodwill whether it admits that or not.

Permanent urban settlement among humans runs at about five or six in every hundred. The figure on a city's rolls is therefore a small share of the people it protects, taxes and buries. Derosam counts the households inside its walls and speaks for every well-keeper and herd on the largest oasis in Kworgalya. Caminor counts foundrymen and speaks for charcoal country three routes deep. When a city is called small, it is being described dishonestly.

Two Stages, and Then It Doubles

The ladder exists because distance is expensive and nothing has ever made it cheaper.

Reach is reckoned in stages along established road and sea routes, not in miles, which lie. A city can hold and supply another city out to the second stage at a steady, bearable price in food, goods and arms. Past the second stage that price doubles, and doubles again for every stage after. Three stages out, one garrison costs what four cost near home. Four stages out, the arithmetic stops being an argument and becomes a refusal.

The reasons are unglamorous. Grain eaten by the escort carrying it. Wells that water two hundred men and not two thousand. Roads that cost more than what moves along them — the same law that decides what a city is built out of decides how far it can rule. Water binds the interior; weather binds the sea.

No power on the continent keeps much spare capacity for holding distant ground indefinitely. Conquest at range is possible. Occupation at range is not. What gets built instead is a chain of near neighbours, each within reach of the last.

A city rules as far as it can feed a road.

Alignment

An Alignment is a group of integrated city-states under a local hegemon.

Integration normally rests on history, mutual advantage, good relations and strategic convenience rather than force. Hegemony means recognised leadership and coordination — the city whose seal settles a dispute, whose army the others expect to see first. It does not mean subjection, and it is not permanent. A city can change its alignment inside a single decade, and cities do.

The word for this tier is not faction. Faction means the parties struggling inside one city's walls, and the powers that hold no city at all. The distinction matters the moment a despatch is read aloud in the wrong room.

Hegemons are a recognisable type: cities of military, naval or scholarly-arcane character rather than mercantile ones, almost always ruled by Klerokon dynasties, whose inherited access to thymara exceeds anything private study provides. A merchant house can outbid a hegemon. It rarely outlasts one.

Bloc

A Bloc is several Alignments with military and economic integration between them, arranged chiefly for common defence. Blocs are assembled to maximise arms, and it shows in what they agree about: who musters, who pays, and who opens which road in an emergency. They agree on very little else, which is why they hold.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

The Infernate of the Creed is not an ordinary Alignment. Its regional units are closer to satrapies — more subordinate than an allied partner, yet still locally grounded and still answerable for feeding their own nearby cities and routes. Merynon does not supply the far desert itself; regional authorities hold the near nodes and pass them upward into a more rigid whole. Its cohesion comes from administration, common rites and sorcerous leadership, not from an exemption: it pays the same doubling cost as everyone else.

Even there, law and power come apart. Kharbeta belongs to Merynon by right and governs itself in practice. Rupater belongs to Skaitos by right and to Kharbeta in fact — Skaitos has been occupied since 1314 DS, so the title survived and the strength behind it did not. Flammund is independent and allied, and administers Arodin's water and Brunthar's gold and tin toward Taluwyn regardless.

Which Tier You Notice

A farmer notices one tier and only one. The city-state sends the assessor, the assize and the garrison. The rest is a word stamped on a customs seal he will never read. Ask him whose Bloc he lives in and he will name the man who takes his grain.

A merchant lives at the Alignment. Tolls, weights, escorts, which court hears his complaint, whose seal opens a gate after dark — all set between hegemon and member, and all of it changes when a city changes its alignment. He follows that news the way a farmer follows weather.

The Bloc matters only when there is a war, and then nothing else matters at all. Vallaris has stood under siege since late 1335 DS, which is a statement about who answered. Cities that learn in the third month of a siege that their Bloc was a courtesy do not usually survive to publish the correction.