Arc 3: Chapter 14: The Floating City
Garihelm is sometimes called the Floating City. It’s easy to see why, once you’re in its streets.
Built at the edge of a floodplain on a series of islands hugging the mouth of a great river where it empties into the bay, much of the city rises directly over the water. Great thoroughfares and bridges span those depths, and the whole of it is made up of stacked layers — streets rising over streets, homes built within the shadow of high cathedrals and trade avenues. Walking within the walls, it all seems to tower over you, even as it drops into uncertain depths beneath, into a swallowing fog.
Reynwell is a temperate land, with mountains on its southern border and many lakes and rivers. Garihelm, set in the kingdom’s north, enjoys a climate which keeps it in a near constant veil. Soft haze coils above the canals and lower streets so the higher parts of the city seem to rise up out of thin clouds.
It is an old place. On every street there are weathered statues. Garden districts and temple streets seem to hover locked in time, centuries old masonry doggedly weathering the damp environs.
When I’d been here last, the streets had been filled with flame and death. Towers and churches had been blasted by siege engines, and knights on sharp, deadly chimera had hunted the avenues like Death’s own riders.
I felt a stranger to it now. Instead of soldiers, merchants and traders from faraway lands filled the rows. The streets were crowded despite the bad weather. Garihelm is larger and more neatly planned than Vinhithe, its avenues wide and diligently maintained. The city had expanded since the war, new buildings erected to replace those burned or shattered by the Traitor Lords, the city rising up where the floodplains prevented it from expanding out.
Shops, manors, and stone basilica dominated the main thoroughfare where I remembered taverns and stables being, making the city look not only renewed but larger, its heights oppressing the streets below. Everywhere I could hear the sound of hammers, as the city literally grew around me with new expansions.
More than once, Emma and I had to clear the road to allow carriages or retinues of liveried knights pass, most of them heading toward the royal palace far away across the city, which I caught glimpses of here and there through gaps in the buildings, a towering edifice rising up from its own lonely island in the bay.
There were beggars on the streets, many of them refugees from some famine or outbreak of violence in a distant province of the Accorded Realms, entire families huddled in alleys beneath blankets and ragged cloaks to stare hollow eyed at the luckier souls passing them by.
I didn’t only see signs of despair and poverty, though. There were puppetmen and jugglers, troubadours and bards using shelter provided by building overhangs or one of the tall trees grown along the plazas to protect their instruments. Merchants hawked their wares, and proselytizers shouted from stacked boxes or makeshift stages. Poets and philosophers, who often resembled one another, debated for the entertainment of crowds, shouting at times to be heard over the echoing din of the city, the occasional rumbles of thunder punctuating clever rejoinders and bursts of emotion.
Chimeras glowered at the throng from the interiors of iron cages. I saw many varieties I had never seen before, often accompanied by handlers in strange garb carrying strange weapons, and I knew many of them must be from the continent.