Lying exclusively to the south of the Svart, between Cheap Street and Low Gate, the Shambles is a place of narrow, twisting alleyways, tottering tenement buildings and cloying desperation. Here, dwell Languard’s poor in cramped, unsanitary conditions.
Overlooking the Dreaming Spires of the Isle of Scholars, Urmas’s house stands on the Svart’s northern bank near Vonya’s Span. The once-finely decorated three-storey town house has a faint air of dilapidation and neglect about it. Few people now visit the aged wizard and renown sage dwelling within, and that’s just how he likes it.
Where the ramshackle and slimy, sagging wharfs redolent with decay cluster thickly together against the Svart’s muddy, slick bank gather the ferociously independent and inbred Takolen. A singular air of ruin and decay hangs heavily over the rotting wharves and the festering, stinking boats moored alongside or grounded in the shallow water thick with silt, seaweed and jetsam.
One of the best known establishments on Cheap Street, Raisa’s Curios fills the first three floors of a tottering four-storey townhouse. Known throughout the city, Raisa’s Curios is one of those places adventurers often come to browse in hopes of finding something interesting or valuable among the junk and bric-a-brac.
Languard’s Dreaming Spires—or sometime simply “the Spires”—is the greatest seat of learning in the Duchy and its only university. Sprawling over the Alina’s Isle, the Dreaming Spires stands in splendid isolation from the stink and clamour of the city. Only reachable by boat, it is here those desirous of learning come.
