Place · The Gaslight Reach

Cinderwick

A soot-and-brass port city built up a hill of stairs, where the Ordinal keeps its finest auction house and the fog keeps everyone's secrets.

Cinderwick climbs a steep hill above a working harbour — a city of stairs, funiculars, and switchback lanes, so tangled that half of getting anywhere is knowing which alley cheats. Coal barges below, mansions in the clean air up top, and in between the Saltmarket, where anything can be bought and most of it is stolen twice.

Places within

• The Cage — the Ordinal’s auction house near the crown of the hill: glass, brass, and very polite men who will ruin you. Where the best curios in the Reach change hands.
• The Saltmarket — the tangled market tiers halfway up; the finders’ unofficial exchange, all nods and passwords and forged provenance.
• The Understair — the warren of service passages, tube-runs, and old funicular tunnels beneath the city. If you know it, Cinderwick has no locked doors — only slow ones.

Feel

Gas-flare on wet stone, the funicular’s cable-hum, gulls and coal-smoke. A city that rewards nerve and punishes the second-cleverest person in the room.

Books set here

• The Cinderwick Job novelette