The Calf Cloister
Nursery of the Exchange
Where the Exchange of Calves takes place. A long, low hall of white wax and pale laterite, lit through silk screens, built at both scales: broad straw-bedded bays for the elephant calves of their thir...
Nursery of the Exchange
Where the Exchange of Calves takes place. A long, low hall of white wax and pale laterite, lit through silk screens, built at both scales: broad straw-bedded bays for the elephant calves of their thir...
Pheromone Crypt
The Mycelium Vanguard's fortress, sunk beneath the main dome of the Sporemarket. Every signal traded above it drifts down eventually, and the Bastion catches it: a sunken rotunda of resin ribs around ...
Mycelium Arsenal
The Mycelium Arsenal's laboratory and armoury, built into the living root-mass of an ancient fungal colony at the far edge of the Verdant Barracks. Its halls are long low tunnels of woven mycelium bra...
Armour Foundry
The heart of the Resin Quarter and of the Mandate's war. In vat-halls tall enough for a bull to stand upright, copal from the Weeping Groves is cooked in great copper-lined pits until it runs like hon...
Living Treasury
The treasury of the Mandate, and the reason no one has ever robbed it. In a tall, cool, windowless vault under the Mandible Precinct hang the repletes: honeypot ants chosen for the elasticity of their...
Resonance Spire
The tallest structure on the Shelf and the junction of the Ground Speech. Its base is elephant city: a broad drum of rammed laterite with four spiral ramps wide enough for a matriarch, climbing to a r...
Hall of Weighing
The oldest room in the Mandible Precinct and the only one in the city whose walls the ants were never permitted to bore. Its laterite is solid and polished to a dull sheen by two centuries of elephant...
Tribunal Hall
The seat of the Ironroot Tribunal: a deep oval hall cut down into the Shelf, its vault pierced by the ironroot itself – thick dark roots that break through the ceiling and run down the walls into the ...
Archive
The ants' archive and the counter-memory of the Tribunal. The Annals are written in spore-ink on wax, and the ink is alive: it keeps a record for decades and then, slowly, eats it. The archive is a ta...
Training Grove
A garrison grown rather than built: a grove of giant bamboo on the northern lip of the Shelf, its living stems bent and resin-bound into colonnades, parade grounds and long open halls roofed with tran...