Tuesday 29 September 2020

Districts of the Wicked City 7: The River

It curves through the city in a great lazy meander, its waters discoloured by coal dust, its surface dotted with floating refuse. Here and there the chemical run-off from some adventurous serpent-folk laboratory creates shining puddles of oily, iridescent colour that spread across the water, to the delight of the shrieking children who splash and paddle in its shallows at low tide. Throughout the harvest seasons it is choked with fleets of barges, carrying confiscated wheat, barley and chickpeas from the surrounding fields and villages to feed the teeming and ravenous mouths of the city's people. For the rest of the year traffic upon the river is dominated by the skimming rowboats which carry passengers back and forth along its banks, evading the perpetual gridlock of the city's roads and bridges. There are still a few fishermen who ply their trade in its waters, but the fish in the river have grown scarce and strange in recent decades, and the fishing boats grow fewer every year. 

Shadman Malik bridge, Samarkand. (Built 1502 - this photo is from 1871.)


Shamans who commune with the spirit of the river upriver of the city say that he appears to them as a fine young man, proud and strong and straight-bodied, full of stories of the lands he has passed through and the hills he has made green. Those who commune with him downriver of the city find him terribly changed: an old man, haggard and shaking, wheedling and demanding, forgetful and irrational and vindictive. (Within the city, of course, the spirit will not appear at all.) Beyond the edge of the city's farmlands the river winds down into the desert, depleted by a thousand irrigation channels, and is lost in a maze of sediment-choked wadis. It does not reappear again. 

The riverfolk of the Wicked City are a breed unto themselves, a hardy race of scavengers who live among the mud and damp of the city's ruinous riverbanks. They make their homes among the leaning buildings that hang over the water at alarming angles, straining against their subsiding foundations, slowly losing their decades-long battle with gravity. They work on the wharves when work is to be had, caulking hulls, weaving ropes and nets, loading and unloading cargoes, and carrying passengers from bank to bank in agile little boats with sails like swift red wings. When work grows slack they take to salvage, digging amidst the muck in search of coals dropped from barges, or diving down into the basements of flooded buildings in search of something worth the taking. They swim like eels and stink of river-mud. A lifetime at the oars covers their bodies with braids of muscle, but the river's pollutants eat into their lungs and stomachs, and they usually die young. 

Turkmen boatmen, 1863.

Everything ends up in the river in the end. Toxic sludge from serpent-man drug-labs. The rusting hulks of crashed scrap-racers. The regalia of fallen noble houses, hurled into the water by their despairing heirs as the triumph of the Wicked King became inevitable. Mutilated statues from the king's statue network, their stone eyes gouged out to prevent them from witnessing who it was that toppled them into the river. The bodies of unfortunates murdered by the city's gangs, weighted down with rocks and thrown from the wharves at midnight, the river their only grave. Every riverman has stories about times they found more down there than they bargained for. Huge river-snakes swimming in from the Rubble. Flooded sinkholes leading down into the Maze. Sealed caskets of antique silver. Bullet-riddled corpses with bricks in their pockets, their faces still covered by the unmistakable death masks of the Secret Police

Most mysterious of all are the vast flooded spaces that extend beneath the temples and palaces that once lined the river in what are now the ruined districts. They may be little more than heaps of rubble on the surface, but the riverfolk swear that beneath them lie immense vaulted chambers, storerooms and basements and dungeons filled with river water, their treasures and secrets hidden beneath darkness and slime. Some of the most daring river scavengers are already in negotiations with the Scrap Mechanics. They want to hire digging tools and diving suits. They want to tear their way into the flooded vaults and drag their contents back into the light. 

One of them even hired a shaman from the steppes to ask the Downriver Spirit if he knew what was in them. The spirit claimed to have forgotten. But there was a crafty and desperate look in his demented eyes that suggested he may not have been telling the entire truth.

6 comments:

  1. At first I was like, woah, since I had never pictured the Wicked City as lying on a riverbank, but then I realized there already are several great rivers flowing through Central Asia and it suddenly made sense.

    And talking about navigable waters of Central Asia, you know what? The story of the Aral Sea fits your setting so well, I would hesitate to take it as a mere source of inspiration when it could be lifted wholesale.

    Once a huge lake and a source of sustenance for many, until important people in faraway places dammed the rivers flowing into it and caused it to dry out. (Technically they were agents of one of the empires, but we can swap it for the Wicked City.) The stolen water now used for some other purposes, fishermen lost their trade, the weather became more severe due to the lack of moisture, and the dust is blown into sandstorms by every other gust of wind. And if that was not enough, islands formed by the exposed lakebed were turned into a dumping ground for bioweapons.

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    1. Yeah, the fate of the Aral Sea (and the other waterways of the region, overtapped to disappearance by Soviet-era agricultural projects) were very much on my mind in writing this post. That's why the fish are dying, and the river disappears into the desert, and the Downriver Spirit is suffering from lead poisoning. The idea that all this desertification might have exposed something best left drowned is a good one, though, and makes a good counterpoint to the way that the flooding of the city's old palaces has apparently immersed something that was better off kept sealed away. I'll have to think about that!

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  2. Thank you for writing this, I figured you would've forgotten about my comment from a year ago. Lots of excellent stuff here, especially since my PC's are decently likely to try and contact that river spirit in the next few sessions.

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    1. No problem. Thanks for the initial suggestion - sorry it took me so long to follow through with it! Hope the game's going well!

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  3. I'm so happy to see you writing again! I have been using the Wicked City as a base for my most recent campaign setting, and my players have absolutely been loving it. (Your post on City of Spires discussing how you handled transitioning the ATWC content to a fantasy game was very illuminating, but sadly arrived after I started the campaign - I handled the migration to classic-Fantasy by making the city a bit more like Ptolus, sticking a bunch of dungeons nearby outside & putting a bunch of stuff from Rappan Athuk under the city to serve as the Maze.)

    Anyway, your writing is being used in play, and it is delightful. :) The Wicked City is a great place for Shadowrun-style gameplay and it's been a big change of pace from our normal 'wandering mercenary band' style. Looking forward to reading more!

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    1. Thanks! I'm always delighted to hear that something I've written has made it into actual play, and the changes you've made sound very practical. My posting schedule is likely to remain somewhat irregular, but I'll try to keep the gaps closer to 'one week' than 'one year'. Good luck with the campaign!

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