"The Triple Cities attract their fair share of sightseers; aristocrats with nothing to do but explore, merchants delayed on their journeys with a few days to kill, middle class families who have saved up for pseudo-pilgrimages. People come from far and wide to marvel at the Cities, the impossible dream of nationalistic idealism made bricks and flesh. They look, of course, at Parliament Square and Huwdone House and the Tukas statue and the Kakranfan Embassy. They look at Dorlaf Avenue's erratic architecture and fantastic range of shops. They look at many more places which we, too, will eventually call at. Very few, however, notice Ashel Street. Very few visitors have even heard of it, for that matter. One of its residents, Myran Smithson, used to give the following directions: "Go to Parliament Square, take four extremely wrong turns and you're there." Spectacular landmarks it has but few. Neither man-made beauties nor expensive horrors of conceited architecture grace Ashel Street. Its shops are nondescript and sell cheap and dull staples, its workshops small, family run affairs. No citizens of fame or wealth live there; several have grown up there, but as soon as said fame or wealth was achieved they rapidly moved somewhere else. Ashel Street is just an ordinary street in the Cities. The inhabitants are poor but almost all live above the watermark of true poverty. The local business bumble along satisfactorily enough to feed some, and there are always enough opportunities elsewhere in the Cities to keep others in labour. And for those unable to work there is the lifeline of the voucher system run by Jalkin Council to supply their essentials. A perennially robust economy has made Ashel Street what it is: quite clean, quite sober, belligerent when kicked, degenerate when encouraged, but basically in control. In the control of whom, of course, is a much-debated point.
It would be facile to ignore Ashel Street, however. Nowhere is wholly without interest, and even the monotony of its houses holds a story. Every house on the street looks like this: A rectangular box made of stone blocks, most cream coloured, several painted in garish primary shades and all much stained by life. Each building is five stories high and fairly narrow so the appearance is of a squat tower. Their roofs are flat and easily accessible by residents, and a balcony runs beneath the windows of the first floor. Maybe ten families live in each building, two per floor, generally leasing their rooms from small landlords who own several properties apiece. The main door opens straight onto the road but the street itself is quite wide, and there is a small gap between each house which leads to a tiny yard at the rear. The towers run in two straight lines the length of Ashel Street and their procession isn't checked there; the whole of the neighbourhood, named Jakks Lane after the main thoroughfare, has been invaded by them. Twas not always thus. Once upon a time Ashel Street made Dorlaf Avenue look prissy and sanitised. It was a narrow corridor running under the fantastically overhanging upper floors of unstable cliffs of brick which swayed whenever the gales came. The scent of mortar hung permanently in the air as the size of each building was being perpetually increased. The population of the Cities had gone nova, there was no more room for fresh houses and the solution was simply to expand the ones they already had. Outhouses were tacked on, rooms were frantically partitioned up and cellars were dug, but often the only direction to travel was up. The houses of Ashel Street grew taller and taller, like the trees in a forest fighting for a place in the sun. The winding walls became more baroque and the roofs grew more distant and...
And then it all fell down. Literally. It fell down in 1255, an occasion now called the Great Collapse. It wasn't a single fall, rather a long summer of cascading houses, crumbling walls and plummeting roofs which left hundreds dead and large swathes of Jalkin and Forgar poor districts mere heaps of rubble. The causes of the Great Collapse are still debated, but the government enquiry drew these conclusions. New arrivals to the Cities were desperate for a place to live, the landlords were greedy for new rents, and so the latter took a two story house, say, and added four more stories on top of it without strengthening the foundations or supporting floors, quite legally as it happens. This, on the whole, wasn't the key for a secure living environment. The authorities, who had hitherto allowed the side-effects of the Cities' population explosion rage unchecked, belatedly stepped in. They slapped out edicts and proclamations and fines, built temporary camps for those made homeless and hired architects who knew more about their trade than which carved deity-symbol would perfectly compliment a decorated tympanum. The main design adopted was basically a copy of a military fort with a few refinements added. Then the government hired legions of builders at crippling expense to itself, shipped in materials from quarries all around and six months later the poor districts were back again, rebuilt and staying rebuilt. Nowadays there are a few who say the new buildings have destroyed the soul of places like Ashel Street and lyricise the romantic aesthetics of the teetering tenements. Presumably they are people who didn't see small children crushed by blocks of masonry or old women dying of dysentery in the shelter camps.
Kenner turned off Dorlaf Avenue, strode down Jakks Lane, through Mistletoe Square, down Federation Road and turned right into Ashel Street. The volume and intensity of people dropped slightly along his journey, though there were still plenty defying the weather, scurrying through the rain and splashing in the gutter. And there we have another reason for not overlooking the likes of Ashel Street, because their residents are in no manner negligible. Every road has its legends, its tales, its secrets, its allegiances, its grudges, its lovers and its epic street squabbles. Every road is its own tiny society, with its characters, heroes, villains and fools. In Ashel Street in the year 1334 there was a baker who was once almost hung, with the rope actually fixed around his neck, only to be saved by a last minute pardon. There was a girl strongly rumoured to have been fathered by an extremely prominent Emissary but not, it goes without saying, born to the wife of that same Emissary. There was a family who were somehow successful hen farmers, despite only having access to a tiny paved yard rather than the large hen farm generally thought necessary. There was an old woman who believed herself to be a Messenger of the God Garrath and occasionally screamed out details of the heavenly vision she had just received, but was otherwise entirely normal. And there was also Myran Smithson.
Myran Smithson lived and worked on the northern row of Ashel Street, just west of its intersection with Mankho's Passage. (Named after Mankho Arner, a hero of the Garreday Uprisings. Mankho lends his name to several parts of the Cities, and as he was as celebrated a philanderer as a revolutionary, all are workable double entendres). Smithson leased premises on the ground floor. He ran a shop whose sign held the imaginative banner 'Smithson's'. A number of the buildings were given a custom-built workplace on their ground floors, and at first glance it appeared that Myran Smithson had been trading from the same premises for the whole eighty years since their construction. Externally, the impression was of a business long neglected by complacency and inertia. The sign itself was a simple piece of warped birch wood nailed unceremoniously above the doorway. Its letters were carefully shaped but their paintwork was starting to crack. The door was sturdy looking but also old, a single plank with a closed panel cut into it. Its brown timbers had, rather perversely, been painted brown. Next to the door was fixed an iron lantern holder, usually empty. On the other side was a square window, lead lined, no sill and in need of a wash. And that was all. No adverts, no banners, no symbols or descriptions, just that one word. Smithson's. But open the door, by the Gods, open the door and inside...
All right, inside lay more homely decrepitude, and still no immediate indication as to what this Smithson did or sold. Inside lay a small, shadowy room which needed the illumination of lanterns as soon as dusk began. The floor was bare flagstone covered with rushes, the walls were painted pale brown but otherwise unadorned. A grimy couch was propped up in one corner, a tripod stool nestled in the middle of the floor, but otherwise the sole features were the fireplace in the right wall and the counter on the far side. The fireplace was a hearth of the country cottage school, large, commanding and practical. A quite astounding collection of pots, pans, beakers, kettles, spoons and spatulas were either scattered around it or hung over the flames from a complicated set of hooks and spits. Clue one: amidst all the clutter were no legs of lamb or potato peelings, only an endless variety of liquids and purees bubbling and sizzling over the heat. The counter was an altar-like construction, apparently a large rectangular boulder with a cloth draped over it. It partitioned off one section of the room. A door stood in the wall behind the counter and next to it was clue two, an imposing iron cabinet split into about a hundred compartments. The lower levels contained small matchwood boxes, all virtually identical though each bearing a different label. Lining the top were rows of sealed glass phials. They held liquids of almost every colour and texture, ranging from what appeared to be clear water to a phial of, apparently, tar.
Clue three came when you took your first breath of air. Myran Smithson's shop had in the last few months alone smelt of the following: burnt hay, roses, sulphur, decomposing beetles, marinated wine, mud, a farmhand's groin, cinnamon, sage, sweet potatoes, a springtime fir forest buried in lime, the stool of an sickly pig, rotting teeth and meat pies. All (except for the meat pies, which tell their own story) came from the means by which Myran Smithson earned his living: the preparation and sale of herbs."
(from City Hobgoblins)