Uzun İskele

Uzun İskele ("Long Pier") is a fishing settlement well to the north of Aquila in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"), where fishermen from the Empire and native people live together. It takes its name from a long natural spur of rock about a hundred to a hundred and fifty metres beyond the settlement, which once served as its pier; a wooden pier is used now. It was said to lie about a day away by ship, or half a day by fast horse.¹²³

Description

Six large buildings stand along the shore, most of them storehouses fitted with beds and hammocks as shared lodgings for unmarried fishermen, with signs of tents that suggest seasonal workers. Inland stand racks for drying fish. About the place lie crates, crab traps, worn and mended nets and a broken cannon that plainly no longer works, and the great skeleton hung over the best-kept hut is a shark's. Other fishermen's shelters lie a few kilometres further along the coast, and across the bay the port of Aquila and the outlines of large ships can be made out.⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸

There is no shop or inn. The young guide Rolf said that he had once been sheltered in its storehouses during a storm, where the people turned down the venison he offered to share and gave him fish soup instead.⁹

People

According to Rolf, two investors run the fishery, at least one of whom always stays there, with about twenty fishermen working for them and two carts to take the goods to the city; they had found a native Inran fisherman, Baka, and brought him there to show them the local fish. Among those, he said, is a tray-shaped fish called the upright fin.¹⁰¹¹

One of the two owners introduced himself as Gozbi. He said that they kept a wounded man there for pay, with no other tie to him, and that the workers took him for a shipwrecked sailor; he defended employing fugitives and former thieves, saying that he would rather they earned a living there than turned to banditry in the mountains. Before visitors went into the sick man's room, he put away a small pouch, four worn pistols, a box of shot and powder. An older native man kept watch on the house from a distance while the others played cards, mostly for copper.^121314151617

The wounded mage

The helmsman of the trading ship Blue Comb told a band of adventurers that he had left his wounded half-brother, the mage Manfred, at Uzun İskele. Riding north on borrowed horses through drizzle and a hard side-wind, they arrived at about three in the afternoon. Fauna scouted the settlement as an ordinary cat and found the mage alive in a hut, behind a closed door, gravely wounded and asleep.^118192021