The Rags¶
"Tens of thousands of items are stored there, silent witnesses to the cultural and historical profusion of the city."
The ragmen of Cadwallon — the network of waste-collectors, scavengers, and archivist-hoarders who work the lower city and the sewers. Not a guild, not a charity, not exactly organized: the Rags are the organized poor who turn the city's garbage into knowledge. Centered on the Demijohn sewer complex and led by the obsessive collector Vytriol, they are the single best source of physical evidence and forgotten objects in the Free City.
The Demijohn¶
A succession of old decantation tanks in the sewers beneath Gamehead and Drakaër. The ragmen collect the city's waste and store it, referenced and catalogued, in the empty tanks. Tens of thousands of items — discarded, lost, stolen-then-dumped, washed up from the tide of the dead — are kept here as a vast, chaotic archive of everything Cadwallon throws away.
It is, in its strange way, the most complete record of daily life in the city — more honest than the Great Scriptorium, because people don't curate their garbage.
Who Leads Them¶
Vytriol — a former cat burglar who, one day, had to hide in the sewers to save his life and fell in love with the maze of pipes. He never left. He now collects strange items obsessively; the hobby became a passion, the passion became a vocation, and the vocation made him the unofficial master of the Demijohn. He can extract astonishing amounts of information from a single discarded object — which is why the Militia regularly consults the "Demijohns" for advice on physical evidence.
The Blowers¶
A specialized sub-group within the Rags: the blowers hunt vermin (rats, worse) using toxic gas, protecting the Demijohn's collection from being eaten or fouled. Dangerous work in confined, flammable, flooded tunnels. The blowers are feared even by other ragmen.
What They Do¶
- Waste collection across the lower city — the unglamorous circulatory system of urban life
- Archival hoarding — cataloguing and storing the city's discards in the Demijohn tanks
- Evidence-reading — Vytriol and senior ragmen read history and meaning from objects; a paid service the militia and others use
- Vermin control — the blowers, with their gas
- Information brokerage — what passes through the garbage tells the Rags who's poisoning whom, who's suddenly wealthy, who disposed of what. They sell the good inferences.
Relations¶
- Militia — regular clients for evidence-reading; a rare clean relationship for both sides
- Guild of Sewer Workers — territorial neighbors in the same tunnels; the Sewer Workers control the water gates, the Rags control the dry tanks; mostly peaceful coexistence
- Guild of Thieves — complicated; the Thieves dump evidence the Rags then archive, which makes the Rags useful and dangerous to them
- Circle of Explorers — occasional trade; the Rags know the shallow tunnels, the Explorers the deep
- The lower-city poor — the Rags are of them; recruitment is constant and grim
The object that shouldn't exist
Vytriol has catalogued an item that, by his reading, belongs to a noble house that claims it was never stolen — meaning someone in that house disposed of it, secretly, recently. He'll sell the inference to the right buyer. The wrong buyer is the house itself, which would very much like the Demijohn's records to suffer a flood.
The blowers' tunnel
A blower team went into a flooded section under Drakaër to gas a vermin nest and didn't come back. The gas they carried is now loose in a tunnel that connects — eventually — to an upper-city cellar. Vytriol needs the team found and the gas accounted for before it surfaces somewhere expensive.