"...a wide open area by the River Culn just upstream of the Suln Tres docks. One thing it isn't is a quay, due to the almost total absence of shipping on the Culn. It is essentially a flagstoned impersonation of a park, where you can have a few minutes' rest on the stone benches and watch the passage of Jalkin's less foul river. Behind the quay stands an arc of typically tall houses, their fronts painted in a variety of bright pastels. The houses were then mainly residences, though also held a couple of inns (The Sea Cow and Psyronemes' Arms, both ticked), a sizeable workshop and a discrete little fourth-floor brothel. Skalamag's Quay also leads on to another famous sight of Jalkin, the Summers Bridge..."
"...All sorts visit Skalamag's Quay; grim wagon drivers pausing to feed their honking donkeys, hirsute dockers carrying goods around the corner to Suln Tres, smart society types lolling across benches and gossiping fervently, harassed young mothers turning their squawking charges off the leash, slumbering drunks stretched out by the quay side. Sometimes a little procession passes by from the Kratzan Riding College up the river, the exclusive academy where the offspring of local merchants are taught the unique art of urban horsemanship..."
"...the workshop,
a two-story metalsmiths which stood oddly silent and deserted. It was actually neither but the smiths
specialised in horribly complicated work on cogs and coils, which didn't make
much noise and barred distractions. A
long, empty iron cage hung over the door, but once it had indeed held a metal
man. His body had been made of tin
plates, his head a blank copper sphere, his innards a fiendishly elaborate maze
of clockwork-driven pinions. Half a
year's work had gone into fashioning the metal man; half a year so that, twice
a day, the golem could walk five jerky steps inside the cage, stop at the end,
salute, laboriously turn round and walk back.
It was advertising of the first order.
Tacky, unique and completely useless, hordes had gathered to see the
metal man walk and now the Skalamag's Quay smiths did horribly complicated work
on cogs and coils for half the country.
Industrial success the Jalkin way.
"We
always used to come here when we were kids, remember," Kenner
reminisced. "Used to love watching
it."
"You used
to love messing about with your mates and throwing each other in the
river."
"Hey, not
all the time. Had pauses to dry off,
like. You know," he continued, not
one to be diverted, "I used to think - well, pretend really - that that
tin bugger was a real person. An' you
know, I used to envy him. That's what I
wanted to be when I was big. He spent
the day standing still, then walks to the end of his cage an' walks back. Job well done. Ha. They even called him
the Guardsman din't they?"
"And then
one night he was struck by lightning," Margat reminded him."Yeah." Kenner gloomily contemplated the empty cage, which had been left
almost as if in tribute. It wasn't the
original cage, however. That had been
shattered when the electrified Guardsman (they do say) had shot thirty feet
into the air, glowing brightly, before dropping into the Culn and exploding."
(from City Hobgoblins)