Gazetteer - Tixryn

Tsai Gazetteer

Tixryn - Karad

The capital city is called Great Ashkarad, but there is little great about it besides its massive city walls, built to repel nomads, and the majestic sweep of its deep blue harbour, rimmed with bone-white cliffs. Most buildings are windowless rectangular blocks three or four stories high with interior courtyards, whitewashed and layered with jagged shards of seashell to repel climbing thieves. Great Ashkarad lives by the sea trade, and has many inns, bawdy houses, and smoking dens in a tangled warren along the waterfront. As well as exporting the produce of the sea (seaweed, dried fish and squid, pearls, serpent bones), Great Ashkarad is a centre for the production of the feverishly addictive beverage known as ichorwine - the powerful merchants who control this trade can get away with anything in the city.
Its population of 8000 includes about 500 Tixryni speakers, mostly soldiers, 1000 Kitabans, and 2000 Zagathi - the land is too dry for Kalamen. The remaining folk, the Karadans proper, are the poorest community of the city, and seem a lost people - dull, unimaginative, craven when confronted by strength and sadistic when confronted by weakness. They follow the Kitaban Rite, but detest the middle-class Kitabans as much as they do the Zagathi. There are few wealthy or learned persons among them. Their simmering resentment and hatred of foreigners frequently boils up into violence, both on a small scale (knife in the back in darkened alley) and a large (mobs storming palaces, guardhouses, or the wrong sort of temple and being cut down in droves).
The largest and most impressive building in Great Ashkarad is the Temple of the Mishapuri Rite, a soaring mass of greenstone towers that overshadows the bazaar. On its grounds is a font of miraculous brine that draws pilgrims from the far reaches of Zagath. It is a sumptuously decorated structure within, for the Zagathi who built it count many wealthy merchants among their number.
Other sights include the Pit of Judgement (a relic of less civilised times that sinks into the centre of the Upper Market, a favourite spot for the disposal of murder vitims), the Temple of the Ceryx (preserved from heathenish times, a small building of intricately carved greenstone decorated with countless artifacts of ceryx horn), and the High Palace, a smallish rectangular hulk atop the highest point of the city. Now the residence of the Baron Ternath, it was formerly home to a Zagathi overlord of Great Ashkarad, and is decorated somewhat inappropriately with garish copper death masks on the outside and fiendish traps within.
The Baron Ternath is a stout-hearted warrior, inflexible, pious, and unimaginative, who has managed to retain power for many years and has a fearsome reputation for justice untempered by mercy. Originally from the County of Delisshad in Lesser Tixryn, he sailed to many lands as a young man, distinguishing himself in valour in the Emperor's service. He will entertain visiting clerics of the true rite in fine style and encourage them to remain. He had four children, two boys and two girls: the younger daughter lives safely tucked away in Delisshad, the younger son is a student at the magical academy at Makanos, the older daughter lives secluded within the palace, and the oldest son disappeared some years ago while searching for a fabled shipwreck. The standard of the barony is white, with a black ceryx rampant.
4000 farmers and fisherfolk live in the belt of settled land around Great Ashkarad, growing saltwater garlic, greywheat of Karad, salt plums, and fiery chilies. 6000 more settled agriculturalists dwell in another region called the Faqli Am 40 km SW, where there is a fortified inn "Gavaq Khum" for travellers bound to or from Great Ashkarad. The Faqli Am is famed for the omnipresence of dried turtle meat in its cuisine, the hulking great mud brick towers in which the peasants live, and the regularity with which bloodied heaps of said peasants are found on some remote saltpan, slain by brigands or flunkies of the ichorwine barons of Great Ashkarad.

There are perhaps another 2000 fisherfolk, collectors of pearls, seaweed farmers, and serpent hunters scattered along the arid coast. Also in the lowlands live considerable numbers of nomads, though they have never been counted: dark zagathis and their goats, karadans with jet-black ceryx, strange martial clans of robed Lomen with filed teeth and pink eyes. The plains, forests, and roads of Karad are all dangerous; each people that dwells there is turned against the other, each clan within each people, each family within each clan - they all carry razor sharp weapons, women, men, and children, and only overwhelming force brings a degree of order to the barony - and that only at tax collection time.

20 000 Karadans are on the census as living in the mountains above Baqri, and 10 000 above Karandu; these towns are abandoned except for garrisons of soldiers and Kitaban merchants, except on market days and during the annual festival at the start of the rainy season, when as many as 10 000 Karadis from the hills and plains nomads flood Baqri and Karandu. The hill people are herders of sheep and goats, subsistence farmers, and tappers of the ichorwood trees, living at isolated fortresslike homesteads or in the numerous caves of the Dragon's Bones. They are great practitioners of the vendetta, congenitally fearless, and adorn themselves with native copper and semi-precious stones wrested from the mountains. They are superstitious, but not religious, having little time for any god. They avoid speaking to priests and will not touch one, alive or dead, but consider it unlucky to kill one.

Baqri is a rough hewn town of great slabs of black stone, with a vast paved market square, a hulking fortress in which 500 baronial guards stand watch, and a mighty palace, half sumptuous and half decayed, in which the Emperor of the Rain festival resides for a week each year before being staked out to die on a nearby mountain. The population is usually restricted to a smattering of about 700 Kitabans, mostly merchants and their bodyguards, with 500 outcasts of the mountain folk grubbing at small plots outside the wide belt of stone-fenced sheep pens that surround the town. These outcasts are a very desperate lot, vile and traitorous scum every one of them. Baqri has several well-fortified inns catering to travellers; it lies 45km by road from the Kitaban border and 70km from Faqli Am.

Karandu is smaller than Baqri, curiously decorated with hundreds of ornately carved stone pillars, but has the same general organisation - huge marketplace, fortress with 500 guards, palace only occupied for a week a year (but the Emperor may enjoy it again next year, if he/she is not challenged for the position and bested in the meantime), population of 300 kitabans within and 300 outcasts without.
It is only accesible by road from Great Ashkarad, about 100 km ESE. Karandu is built over an underground river, making it a fine place to endure a siege - and a good place to stick people you want to be rid of. Delvings deep into the earth here, long abandoned gem mines, are today the principal prison of the Barony. An undetermined number of persons who offended the Baron live far underneath the town, eating the garbage thrown down by the superterranean inhabitants, cave crickets, and each other.
As yet not a major settlement, Naha Dornu (200), 130km NW of Great Ashkarad, is a recently discovered source of diamonds that may rival Mafra Karad in Kitaba in the number and quality of its stones. Set amidst rugged and denuded canyonlands, with no safe route to the coast, most of its inhabitants live in tents or holes in the ground. Already its only watering hole, the "Swan and Gugglet", has a fearsome reputation for bloodletting.
Also to the north of Ashkarad, somewhere along the miles of lonely desert coast, is believed to lie the wreck of the "Vashti", a great Imperial Man of War carrying booty from the siege of Murzagoth and 500 men that ran foul of a curse and vanished without a trace.
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