Steinbruck exists because the book needed somewhere to happen.

That sounds obvious, but it is actually quite a useful way of building the world. I hadn’t sat down beforehand and decided that Eidengard needed another market town on the map. I reached a point in The Ash Cartographer where the characters needed a real place: somewhere a carriage could be stopped, prisoners could be held, horses could be stabled, evidence could be recorded and a magistrate could plausibly take charge.

So Steinbruck appeared.

Once it was there, though, it couldn’t just be “the town in Chapter 20”. If people live there, what does it do? Why is it there? What sort of place grows up around a bridge and a busy road?

A town built around traffic

Steinbruck is not a major city. It is a regional road and market town, just beyond a stone toll bridge on an established route through Eidengard.

Most of its importance comes from things passing through it.

There are carts, livestock, merchants, officials, riders and travellers. Horses need shoeing. Wheels crack. Harness breaks. Goods need storing. Drivers need beds. Somebody has to sell fodder, somebody has to mend axles, and somebody has to know which road has washed out after three days of rain.

That gives the town a fairly practical economy: farriers, wheelwrights, harness-makers, coopers, ostlers, grain merchants, wagon yards and small smithies making nails, hinges, buckles and other unglamorous but essential things.

I don’t imagine Steinbruck as particularly pretty. The approaches get muddy. The older central streets have some stone and gravel underfoot, but not enough to stop everything looking brown after bad weather. There is woodsmoke, dung, wet wool and the sound of iron being worked somewhere nearby.

It is the sort of place where you can probably get almost anything you need to continue a journey, but not necessarily anything you’d want to buy as a souvenir.

The Grey Ox

I’ve added a few places that may never be important, but make the town easier to picture and give me somewhere to put people if we return to it.

The first is the Grey Ox, a large inn near the western market approach. It has a broad yard, proper stabling and rooms of very variable quality. Carriers and drovers use it, as do merchants travelling with goods or animals.

The beer is decent, the food is filling and somebody is almost always awake because carts rarely arrive at convenient times.

The keeper is Marta Kessler, a widow who inherited the lease along with its debts and eventually got the better of both. She remembers faces more reliably than names and has little patience for travellers who think buying supper entitles them to interrogate everyone in the room.

I suspect the Grey Ox would be one of those places where you can learn a great deal about what is happening on the roads, provided you are willing to accept that half of it will be wrong.

The Copper Kettle and Brunner’s Yard

The Copper Kettle is smaller and more local. It sits off the market square and has no serious stable, so most of its customers are people who actually live in Steinbruck: clerks, tradesmen, shopkeepers and anyone finished with the market for the day.

The sign is an old dented copper kettle. Above the door is an iron nail driven through the lintel.

Nobody currently running the place put it there. Nobody is especially keen to remove it either.

Nearby is Brunner’s Yard, where Jakob Brunner and his men repair wagons. They can replace spokes, straighten ironwork, patch a cart bed or improvise something ugly enough to make another twenty miles.

Brunner himself is slow-speaking and almost impossible to hurry. He charges fairly until somebody tells him that an impossible repair absolutely must be finished before dawn. Then the price goes up.

I can see both places being useful later, even if only for a paragraph.

The slightly stranger side of Steinbruck

The town also has one feature that matters more directly to the novel.

Steinbruck has a longstanding, usually fairly mild susceptibility to disturbances in the Veil.

I don’t want that to make it a famous haunted town. Nobody arrives under a sign saying Welcome to Steinbruck, Where the Dead Walk. Most of the time nothing unusual happens at all.

What interested me more was the idea that occasional oddness, spread over generations, would leave behind habits even when people had forgotten why those habits began.

So older houses may have small marks cut near a doorway, old iron worked into a threshold, dried plants or knotted cord above a lintel. Some of these things may once have had a genuine purpose. Some probably never did. Most people would just see them as part of an old building.

There is also a local custom of opening a window or exterior door briefly after somebody dies, so the departing soul has a clear way out before the room is closed again.

I like that because not everybody has to believe it.

Some people probably take it seriously. Others probably think it is nonsense and still open the window because their parents did, and because this is not the moment to discover whether Grandmother was right.

That feels much closer to how old customs survive than having every resident deliver a neat explanation of the local supernatural rules.

Provincial does not mean incompetent

Another thing I wanted to avoid was the fantasy habit of making local officials useless simply because the protagonists have arrived.

Steinbruck has a magistrate, a town watch and enough clerical machinery to take statements, record property, hold prisoners and send reports to regional authorities. Most of the watch’s work will be ordinary: theft, fights, missing animals, damaged carts, market disputes and people who have had too much to drink.

When something much stranger happens, they do not suddenly become experts in the Veil. But they do know how to do their jobs.

That distinction became quite important in the book. Steinbruck is provincial, but it is not foolish.

The feel of the place

The version of Steinbruck I have now is somewhere between a market town, transport stop and small administrative centre.

Early in the day the market square is noisy. Later, the serious business has moved into yards, sheds and counting rooms. Horses are being walked. Wheels are being repaired. Clerks are copying reports. Somebody is arguing about a delivery. Somebody else is looking for a room.

Underneath that ordinary life are a few old things nobody quite agrees how seriously to take.

A nail in a lintel. A mark beside a door. A window opened for the dead.

I also gave Steinbruck a local expression:

“In or out; don’t keep the road waiting.”

Most of the time it just means somebody is standing in a doorway.

Probably.

Building from the story outwards

Steinbruck is a good example of how I want to keep expanding Alkainos.

The story gives me a reason for a place to exist. Then I work out what has to be around it for that place to function. If there is a busy road, there will be inns and farriers. If there is a magistrate, there will be clerks and records. If generations of people have occasionally noticed something strange around death and doorways, there will probably be customs left behind long after the original explanation has blurred.

That seems more useful than filling a map with names first and trying to make them interesting later.

Steinbruck began as somewhere the plot needed for a few chapters. It now feels like somewhere people live.