There are places in Alkainos where respectable people go to do things they would rather not do at home.

Port Baratka is one of them.

The capital of the Free Isles sits across two volcanic islands, its harbour squeezed between steep black cliffs. Ships come here because Baratka offers something the lawful ports of the mainland cannot: discretion. Merchants can arrange awkward cargoes. Nobles can conduct negotiations that never happened. Smugglers can find buyers. Scholars can look for things respectable institutions would prefer remained lost. Fugitives can disappear into a population where asking too many questions is generally considered poor manners.

It would be easy to make a place like this simply lawless. Baratka is more interesting because it isn’t.

Seven gangs and a functioning city

Port Baratka is governed by seven dominant criminal factions, represented through the Council of Seven. They compete, they control different parts of the city’s economy, and violence between them certainly exists. But none of them benefits if the port becomes unusable.

So Baratka has rules.

Violence is forbidden inside the neutral Lantern Houses. Ships are protected during agreed trading windows. Sponsored visitors cannot simply be murdered because somebody dislikes the purpose of their visit. Gang disputes are supposed to go before the Council. Tavern debts are paid.

These aren’t laws in the conventional sense. They work because the organisations controlling Baratka have a shared interest in making sure they work — and because breaking them is likely to bring consequences rather more immediate than a summons from a magistrate.

That contradiction has become the thing I like most about the city. Baratka sells freedom, but freedom only has value because somebody maintains the conditions in which it can exist.

High City and Low Shore

The geography helps.

The main settlement, the High City, climbs the volcanic cliffs above the harbour. This is where much of Baratka’s political power and high-value business sits: the Black Quays, the twisting Smuggler Lanes, the neutral meeting places of the Lantern Quarter, the expensive establishments of Velvet Row and, above them, Council Heights.

Across the narrow strait is the Low Shore: shipyards, warehouses, provisioning markets and rough residential districts. Shipbreaker’s Reach builds and dismantles vessels. The Salt Market feeds ships preparing to leave. Parts of the Driftwood Ward are constructed from salvaged ship timber.

There is deliberately no bridge joining the two halves. Ferries carry people across the harbour instead, which makes movement visible and controllable. In a city built on information, smuggling and negotiated neutrality, geography becomes part of the system of government.

Beyond the city, the Free Isles are dry, rocky and relatively poor. Fishing provides much of what the islands can produce for themselves; staples arrive by sea. Lesser islands can be used but not privately owned. The whole archipelago depends upon remaining useful to people who live somewhere else.

The people who make Baratka work

The seven gangs aren’t simply seven flavours of street criminal.

Some dominate the harbour and smuggling routes. Others deal in finance, information, high-value negotiations, enforcement or the recovery of dangerous artefacts. The Ashen Choir occupies stranger territory, connected with funerary rites and occult matters.

That division lets Baratka function almost as a criminal city-state. A visiting merchant might deal with one organisation for transport, another for credit and another to ensure that a sensitive meeting remains private.

Mainland governments may condemn Baratka publicly while finding it useful privately. There are always transactions for which neutral ground is convenient.

Lanterns on the water

For all its pragmatism, Baratka is deeply superstitious.

Sailors throw coins into the harbour before leaving. Lanterns are not willingly extinguished on open water. Certain sea spirits are better left unnamed.

And beneath the lower cliffs lies Daggerjaw’s Nook, a tidal cavern most locals prefer to avoid. Strange tides and failing lanterns are associated with the place, as is one of Baratka’s more persistent figures of folklore: Auntie Caldra, the sea-witch said to dwell beneath the harbour.

Whether every Baratkan believes those stories is probably the wrong question. Sailors are quite capable of laughing at a superstition in a tavern and observing it meticulously once the harbour lights have disappeared behind them.

That is roughly where I want the supernatural to sit in the western parts of Alkainos. Most days in Baratka are about ships, money, food, labour, favours and survival. The stranger things are there too, but they intrude into an otherwise recognisable world rather than replacing it.

A useful sort of freedom

Port Baratka is still developing. There are districts I want to explore further, individual gangs that need more character, and plenty of questions about how a place like this survives pressure from larger states.

But its central idea now feels fairly solid.

It isn’t a pirate city because nobody is in charge.

It is a pirate city because the people in charge have built a system that makes being outside everyone else’s rules extraordinarily profitable.

And if you visit, pay your tavern bill.