Denekt

The Upper Town. The highest part of the shelf holds the Eagle Hall of the Deneskid line and the houses of the families who claim kin with it. It is the quietest part of Denekt and the proudest, and its women own the best terraces for a day's walk around.

The Scree Terraces. Below and around the town, Bound families work narrow barley terraces built up out of scree, one wall above another, and live in fieldstone huts at their ends. The soil is thin, and every basket of it was carried up by someone.

The Stair Road. The north end of town, where the track to the Stair begins, is where Denekt meets the outside. It has the Ladder Inn, a mule yard, a smithy and the Stair Post. Stairfolk come down here to sell goats and hire out as guides, and Aldmeri from the Westmarch garrison sometimes come down the other way.

The Pens. The east side of town is given over to stone folds for goats and Spine sheep, the shearing floor and the cheese sheds.

The Barracks. A single long mess-hall and barracks on the west edge houses the garrison that watches the Stair: a few hundred Phymun who take their turn out from Tharxa and are glad to go home.

The Eagle Hall. The old hall of the Deneskid line is a long, low stone building like any Phymon hall, except that a row of Karzhan eagle feathers hangs along its inner wall, a second feather for each Deneskid king besides the one he is buried with. Tothakhor's is among them, who held the Gap. There is a gap in the row where Phospor Deneskid's feather would be, because the Skekar arrested him for taking gold in 741. King Kenithor's feather is not there yet.

The Stair Post. A square stone watch post at the head of the Stair Road looks north to where the Aldmere garrison has held the Stair since the Bridge Treaty of 1052. The two garrisons can see each other's fires. The Tyrthas keeps a man at the post in every season, and what he truly watches for is Bound heading north.

The Hunting Wood. The high woods of Spine fir and Karzhan pine above the town are the hunting ground of the Karzhan bear and the ibex. Pairs of young Phymun from the Anvil come here for the bear rite, two on foot with spears against one bear, and Denekt's Bound are made to carry back whatever the wood gives up.

The Temple Road. A track runs southeast from Denekt through the Heights to the Temple of Kharnoth. Denekt's companies walk it before a campaign, and the town's old men claim the temple is more theirs than Tharxa's.

Denekt lives on what the mountain allows. The Bound herd Tharaxi goats and Spine sheep on the high meadows in summer and bring them into the Pens for winter. They grow Tharaxi barley on the scree terraces and snare snow grouse in the cold months. Phymon women run the households and the flocks and keep their tallies. The garrison drills on a bare field below the Barracks and eats together on dakt.

Trade is small and quiet. Wool, hides, cheese and ibex-lichen for the dyers go down the long road to Tharxa. The Stair Road brings in salt, needles, Aldmeri cloth and news, much of it through the Stairfolk, whose young keep leaving for Kemvos and Tharxa and not coming back. The Ladder Inn is where a traveler finds a guide over the Spine, and its keeper does not ask where the traveler is going. Prices are Tharxa's, but more is paid in goats and cheese than in iron bars.

Denekt keeps Wardens' Day, the Three Days and the Harvest Watch like the rest of Tharax. The harvest comes late this high, and the Watch sometimes ends before the barley is in.

Zodakt the Innkeeper, an Outdweller of fifty with a Stairfolk wife, keeps the Ladder Inn and knows every guide on the mountain by name. He is on good terms with the Tyrthas man at the Stair Post, and that is the most dangerous thing about him.

• A Bound family from the Lowfields was seen at the Ladder Inn a day before the Tyrthas came asking. Zodakt says they went south. His wife's cousin says they went up the Stair.
• Stairfolk guides say the Watcher turned its head early this year, before the first snow. The Stairfolk read that as a warning; the garrison reads it as Stairfolk talk.
• The Aldmere garrison on the Stair has doubled its fires since spring. Duke Durift's men say it is the cold. The Stair Post thinks it is something else.
• Two young Phymun from the Anvil, one of them an Outdweller's son, have gone into the Hunting Wood after a bear. Denekt's Bound have been told to be ready to carry one of them down, and nobody has told them which.
• Some in the Eagle Hall want the old families to stand behind Kenithor against Lekakor in the Iron Contract vote, and some want them to stand behind no one.

FADING. Denekt is old, proud and shrinking. Its Phymon sons go to the Anvil, the Tharxa halls and Caelvenne's lake shore, and fewer of them come back to farm scree. Its Bound can see the Stair, where freedom lies a few days' climb away under the Charter of Hearths, and each year some of them go. The Stairfolk who once fed the town's trade are dying out. The Deneskid line's hall still stands at the top of the town, but the future the Sastorid king argues for is being settled in Tharxa, and Denekt is the kind of place that argument leaves behind.

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