GAZETTEER · THE VALE

The High Terrace

The top step of Highbridge — the broad shelf of dressed grey stone where the free city keeps up the pretence of being a state. The Crossing-Hall and its moot, the great chantry to Vallen the Wright, the pale envoy's house, and the best air in the gorge; also the quiet knowledge that all of it stands on a claim House Vandahl could wake with a single march.

The higher you climb in Highbridge the thinner the mist and the older the money, and at the top the climbing stops on the High Terrace: a broad shelf cut into the south bank where the imperial engineers once seated whatever a bridge-fort needs and the settler-folk now seat a government they are not entirely sure they are allowed to have. Here stand the Crossing-Hall where the reeve and the trade-moot rule the free city; the Wright's Chantry, the great dead-god cathedral whose bells set the hours for the whole gorge; the counting-houses of the old families; and, narrow and pale among them, the house Aelvyrenn keeps for its envoy, so that the sky can look down on the grave-market at its leisure. The joke every terrace child knows is that the High Reeve's chair is bolted to the floor directly over the old Vandahl dais — the settlers govern literally on the House they are pretending is not their landlord — and the joke stops being funny the year a Vandahl banner is seen on the north road. The people up here are administrators and priests and heirs, and they carry the free city's whole anxiety in their shoulders: that the independence they collect tolls to defend is a courtesy, not a right, and holds only as long as no one with a real army decides otherwise.

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