The Faerie Knight

Chapter Five (Part 2)

4

Afallach was an island in a sea of mist. The climate was dynamic here; weather at the foot of the mountains could differ wildly from the weather on Level Seven. The valley below the city was wet and fertile, home to Whystaria's most famous apple orchard. Mist was born in the valley's depths and rose throughout the morning, obfuscating the bridges of the lower levels. When the sun was high enough in the afternoons of summer, early autumn, or late spring, as it was now, it cast its dispelling rays through the city's heart, revealing all. When night fell, the mist would return, creeping back into the valley to settle, awaiting the dawn. Sometimes, on cloudy days, the city would float between a sea of mist below and an ocean of clouds above.

If Gwen had been some kind of urban planner, perhaps the city would have made sense to her. As it was, the city's levels had little evident organization to them. No single level or even district was wholly devoted to industry or mercantile or residence or politics; it was all a jumble—a neighborhood here, a textile facility squeezed between two houses there, a warehouse hither, a pottery thither, and an old guildhall over bridge yonder—an urban maze with something to see at every corner, down every street.

The bridges, too, held little rhyme or reason to her. They crisscrossed the many cliffs and ridges of the city at every opportunity, inclining and declining to adjacent levels. But the real eye-catchers were the leviathans that spanned the mile-wide gap over the center; far above the orchard's apple trees, these bridges were wide enough for two carriages to travel abreast, and pedestrians besides.

Gwen knew nothing of architecture; it seemed impossible to her that such large constructs could support their own weight, composed as they were of great stone bricks and slabs. She wondered if it was latent Hi-Arcanan magic that kept them tall and strong, or if it was mere mathematics, another of Gwen's weaknesses. Oh, Twylyth had tried very spiritedly to teach her multiplication and division and more complicated things involving letters, but Gwen had always struggled to see the value in numbers beyond currency; the fact that twelve Moons equaled a Sun was all the math Gwen needed.

As a trade city first and foremost, Afallach hosted every craft imaginable. Here were cobblers, tailors, weavers, vintners, brewers, jewelers, smiths of every kind, carpenters, sculptors, painters, potters, cartographers, and glassblowers too; the university employed scholars, historians and physicians; and hidden amongst the winding and sloping streets were a rare few arcane practitioners—alchemists, fortunetellers and astrologers. All these trades and more were enforced by their individual guilds, the operations of each overseen by a guildmaster at a guildhall, and all these guildmasters collectively formed the city's ruling Council of Commerce, helmed by the merchant lord himself.

Over time, the rich and powerful, including the many guildhalls and the Order's chapterhouse, did as the rich and powerful are wont and moved up-city whenever a higher, dominant level was added, where they constructed buildings larger, grander and more lavish than the ones they left behind. This left a scattering of impressive buildings throughout the city to be reclaimed by the middle class. The most notable exception to this trend was the merchant lord's estate, which had remained on Level Six because it turned out relocating a waterfall and private mountain grotto was not the most practical of undertakings.

But Gwen's destination was not Arth Morcant's expansive demesne.

The Order's Afallach branch headquartered on the uppermost level, so Gwen walked to Level Four's south district, took Bridge F, which crossed to Level Six North, and climbed a stair that emerged near the painters' and glassblowers' guildhalls. The journey cost the better part of an hour, and Gwen passed many a person in the street.