Borosevo

Borosevo is the principal city of Emesh, built on steel pilings above the planet's shallow world-ocean. The city is a low, sprawling settlement of five million, its streets narrow and crooked with brick buildings lit by orange street lamps, veined throughout by canals of scummy green water. The count's palace crowns a concrete ziggurat one thousand feet high that dominates the skyline; adjacent stand the Chantry sanctum with its copper dome and nine minarets, and a brutalist concrete bastille that served as the site of the Cielcin inquisition. The city is divided into the White District — a lime-washed upper quarter housing the wealthy — and Belows, the lower warren of canals and rooftop gardens where the poor live.

The merchants' quarter extends to a southern waterfront where fishing trawlers dock and packing houses run on Umandh labor. The city contains an indoor bazaar patronized by offworld tourists and is policed by prefects in khaki uniforms carrying stunners, with surveillance cameras in public spaces. The lowest sections of the city flood entirely in bad weather, with water levels rising well over a foot in some alleys; the city's underground culverts fill with seawater at tide-change. Borosevo's population of five million is fed by glass-tower urban farms filtering sunlight for terranic cultivation and seafood from offshore fisheries. The Umandh are enslaved as dock laborers and aquatic fish herders within the city's fishing industry. A reclamation depot for salvaged ships sits at the very edge of the sea, and the starport near the waterfront serves as the departure point for vessels leaving Emesh. The bastille on the edge of the White District served as the site of the Cielcin prisoner Uvanari's prolonged interrogation and death. The departure airfield lies on the edge of the city, outside the main settlement.