Morant

A cosmopolitan trade hub on the southern coast. Sedekamp and Patt search every academy in town for Little Locke before tracking him down through tavern gossip.

Illustration: Photo by Sherri Hoffman (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0). Real-world photograph chosen for atmosphere — the novel itself has no canonical illustrations.

Morant is the largest trading and port city of the Continent of Galentea and the most populous: about eight hundred thousand permanent residents. It stands on the Plain of Magic Hills — a broad, rich, sun-bathed land whose harvests feed the city's growth year after year. The Silver River, the continent's second-largest water system, quietly waters the plain and empties into the sea west of Morant, giving the city its thriving Hidden Gold Bay and a mighty sea fleet.

The city is split into inner and outer. The inner holds the Upper and Central districts; the outer grew by thirty-six new quarters over twenty years of peace and includes the Academy district in the west (some twenty academies), the Fleet and Port districts in the north-west, the vast Commerce district, the Slum district full of newcomers, the city-defence barracks in the north-east, and residential quarters in the south and east.

The city was originally called Vanhaibao. A hundred and sixty-seven years ago the Grand Duke of the Morant Duchy, Forde Morant, carried out the famous Morant Reform: he abolished the hereditary feudal system and serfdom, freeing some four hundred thousand serfs, and replaced it with a representative council of townsfolk. Uniting the continent's six greatest merchant guilds, he founded the Forde Trade Union and proclaimed a course toward a mercantile state. The city was renamed Morant in his honour — he fell in the war resisting imperial expansion.

The young union drew its neighbours' greed: the Krissen Empire, chief of Galentea's three great empires, declared the reforms unlawful and invaded the Plain of Magic Hills, opening over a century of bloody wars. Beneath Morant's walls and along the Silver River two Krissen emperors and more than ten dukes fell; in the last great battle a clever stratagem felled the empire's sole Sword Saint, which gave the union some twenty years of peace and tipped Krissen into decline.

Morant is the story's starting point: here Lorist spent ten years as a Dawn Academy cadet before Sedekamp and Patt tracked him down (ch 41, 45). A cosmopolitan trade hub where many gods are worshipped and a huge statue and temple of Sigwa — God of the Sun, of Light, of War — stand; small wonder it is called the City of Temples. Seven of the continent's ten best academies are here, hence its fame as the City of Academies.

The city is run not by the Union Council but by the City Chancellery in the Central district, whose head is appointed for five years with an assessment by a City Council of quarter representatives. Morant remains for Lorist an image of an 'earthly paradise' and a distant home longed for by those gone north; in the later volumes House Norton's trade war with the Trade Union reaches here as well.

In Morant up to a million gold coins changed hands daily; one visiting grand duke lamented that the kingdoms' noble officials were less honest even than the city's underworld organisations.

There is no paper in this world — Morant's newspapers are printed on parchment, and the carrier, bringing the new edition, takes back the old to scrape clean and print anew.