Rockcastle

The valley fortress at the heart of Norton territory, walled on both ends — a seven-metre outer rampart and a ten-metre inner wall left behind by the Kemmes occupation. Lorist captures it on his arrival (ch 83–86), Lady Tressi runs the inner household, and Lorist returns here from every campaign.

**The Camora rescue (ch 165).** During the siege Lorist's strike force pulled Baron Camora out of Duke Lukins's water dungeon and broke the coalition outside the wall.

**Winter at Rockcastle (ch 160–161).** Lady Tressi keeps the household running while Lorist drafts the long-form domain-expansion plan that Fatty Shi helps him cost-out.

Rockcastle stands in a valley-gorge among the Morgan Hills: the unbroken mountain range suddenly breaks here, and a wide road runs through the gap. The inner valley stretches seven or eight hundred metres, and at each end the mountains leave narrow openings — only seventy or eighty metres on the viscounty side, over two hundred on the other. Wall off the openings and the whole valley is sealed shut. The gentle slopes are ideal for a castle built against the mountainside, while a lone steep-walled peak opposite, its ridgeline reaching into the dark forests, forms a natural defensive barrier.

The main wall is double: an outer rampart of about seven metres, and behind it what from afar looks like a ten-metre wall is in fact a row of buildings raised on the rampart-walk, with battlemented roofs — armouries, guard barracks, the winch for the iron portcullis. The surface is coated with costly green clay, smooth and even. The walls stand about a hundred metres apart, joined by three iron gates. The front wall on the viscounty side is short (seventy or eighty metres) and at first only crudely stacked.

The valley had always belonged to the Nortons but was never built up. House Kemmes — a merchant family that bought a title and Northern Lands from the Second Prince for two hundred thousand gold Forde — surveyed the area and judged the Morgan Hills on Norton land the ideal site for a castle to give the house 'a hundred years of prosperity'. The Kemmes bribed the boundary officials, annexed the Norton copper mine, deliberately provoked the conflict, and set about raising the double wall here; the Iberia Kingdom's famed architect Master Siroba was preparing their plans for a castle and a city of sixty thousand. For this the Kemmes meant to sink three hundred thousand gold Forde over five years.

Less than four months into the work, Lorist arrived. On reaching it he stormed the Kemmes wall, freed over seventy clansmen led by Old Balek from the copper mine, and reworked the Kemmes plan to suit himself: he scrapped the redundant central keep, set aside ground for a square and residential and commercial quarters, and ordered the crude front wall rebuilt to a bastioned shape of his own design.

Rockcastle becomes the heart of the Norton domain: Lady Tressi runs the household here, and Lorist returns from every campaign. In the siege of ch 123 the defenders under Ovigis beat off the Kemmes assaults with siege ballistae and shelter from the arcing rain of Kemmes longbows behind wooden roof-shelters on the walls, coated in sticky clay (the idea of Master Siroba, who had gone over to Norton service).

Through the winter of ch 160–161 the castle holds the household while Lorist drafts the development plan in Kobo. In ch 163 Grand Duke Lukins musters nearly fifty thousand noble levies and besieges the fortress fruitlessly for a month at heavy cost — Sword Saint Jossk reckons that wild rabble could not take it in a hundred years. Different translations call it 'Rockcastle' or 'Rock Fortress'; early Russian releases wavered between 'Krepost Tverdynya' and 'Zamok Panshi' before settling on the canonical 'Skalny zamok'.

The green adhesive clay coating the castle walls is Galentea's finest and costliest building binder; it is made from rubber-vine sap out of the Roman Empire, and a single barrel of sap costs one gold Forde.