The Songs of Loss, book one : Armanth

Chapter 3- Priscius

Priscius was at last revising his point of view, after having had the stern and very unpleasant sensation that he'd just been taken for the last of the fools.

It was a few days earlier, in the muggy morning sea mist laden with human effluvia and invaded by screams, that he had followed Batsu to the Armanth Cages Market. The capital of the Merchants' Guild, an organization spread throughout the Seas of Separation, so powerful that it had literally bought itself its own city-state, was a pearl of progress and freedom among all Lossyan cities; a city with such modern mores that no citizen had, except following a trial for a serious crime, to fear one day being enslaved and branded with a linci. Few scholars and intellectuals dreaded the inquisition of the Council's Ordinatorii, whose presence, imposed and unavoidable, was little more than representative and consultative; but Armanth was also the major hub of the slave trade in all the Seas of Separation. Slaves came from every corner of the known world: parked and then sold, trained, broken, cruelly and mercilessly educated; the most prestigious merchant houses had their most imposing Slave Gardens here, from which they were forcibly trained in all the arts of pleasing and entertaining, and destined to become animals to serve and give pleasure and prestige to their owners.

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Armanth had been founded three centuries earlier. Initially a simple fishing village sheltering refugees fleeing the wars of the Eteocles and the persecutions of the Church in the north, the city had grown up as best it could on sandy islets lost in a marshy lagoon, relying solely on trade, welcoming more and more refugees fleeing the legions of Ordinatorii and their exactions; United Cities, Hemlaris, Terencha, the Ginnon, the plains of Eteocles, they came from all over to rebuild their lives in the Bay of Argas, sometimes from as far north as the Mares Saeparent. Freethinkers, intellectuals, scholars, apostates or simply poor wretches who had had the misfortune to be in the path of marching legions, they had no choice but to try and find a ship and cross the sea to Armanth. This difficult crossing was also the city-state's best protection. The legions of the Church of the Council, under the banner of the Hegemony of Anqimenès, had concentrated on their crusade against the Eastern Empire of Hemlaris in a war that had set the entire known world ablaze, finally forgetting this remote and uninteresting refugee city in a corner of the Athémaïs. When Anqimenès finally woke up to find it had a new rival in size, power and political influence, the powerful Merchants' Guild had already made it its capital; and Armanth exceeded one million inhabitants.

Only once, thirty years earlier, had the Hegemony attempted military action under Church orders against the city of the Merchants' Guild. The crusade was hasty and ill-prepared, and ended in disaster. Alerted well in advance by its networks to the arrival of a disorganized armada - nothing is more effective than trade as a support for espionage, and the Merchants' Guild abuses it -Armanth had hired the services of all the fleets neighboring the islands of the Seas of Separation, including the pirates of Imareth. Not a single Church galleon touched the coast of Athémaïs. Almost as a game, Armanth sent back the surviving Ordinatorii without asking for any ransom. But, except for a few priests and officials who were spared, not before they had all endured five years' imprisonment and hard labor.

Armanth is now considered the beacon of modern civilization from the point of view of a large part of the Seas of Separation: there are more renowned colleges and universities here than anywhere else, where everyone can follow the lectures and debates of some of the world's greatest minds. Even more astonishing, women teach science and literature here themselves. What's more, they can divorce, work, trade, manage their own property and move around freely without the express consent of a male family member. To the delight of the Council of Peers, the city's executive body and the heart of the Merchants' Guild, aristocratic princesses from other cities, far more fussy about the precepts of the Council's Dogmas, have even sought refuge here and sought asylum from the city's authorities.