The Kilns

The craft and industrial quarter on the city's eastern working edge — smelters, forges, the Old Work market where salvaged temple-bronze is weighed and worked, and the salvor culture that lives off a dead empire's scrap. The air is green with kiln-smoke and the salvors cough green with it.

On the eastern edge, where the working city meets the wild road, Highbridge burns: the Kilns are a quarter of smelters, tanneries, forges and drying-yards, roofed in soot, and the loudest of them serve the one trade the Vale cannot exhaust — the Old Work. Everything the diggers drag out of the near ruins comes here to be weighed by the pound as scrap or, if it is intact, sold whole on the Old Work market as a working no living smith can reproduce and no living smith can mend. Master-salvor Hesk Durrow of the Stonewright Moot keeps the market and can price a piece of imperial bronze by its ring, though his hands shake too badly now to work one; the shake is the Verdigris Lung, the green wasting that comes off years of breathing sealed damp vaults, and half the master salvors have it and work anyway because the trade pays and the alternative is not eating. The dark craft-lore of the Kilns is that the good Old Work keeps arriving from farther out and higher up — the easy near ruins were stripped generations back — so the salvors go deeper and worse-kept places for it every year and price the risk into every bar. It is a hard, hot, coughing quarter, proud of its hands, and the only one where a newcomer can turn scrap into coin, a broken blade into a whole one, or a lung into a slow grave.