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The Cursed Blue Rose
What Kharbeta produces is not ore, timber or grain. The town stands on the Ashen Plains, on ground that offers a settlement almost nothing, and it lives instead by scholarship: instruction, copying, calculation, and the long grinding disputation that turns a young mind into a usable one. Lessons are given in courtyards shaded against the glare, and the ash gets into the ink and the paper as it gets into everything else. It is a modest town and a recent foundation of the present age, without the weight of older places behind it and with no use for it.
Kharbeta's people are Lohanar, but the intellectual habits of the southern accord have been bent to another purpose. The Creed rules the town outright and the Infernal Creed is its faith, and the two are not distinguishable in a place where doctrine is the syllabus. Its immediate masters are the Legion of Ash, whose demands shape what is taught and to whom, and whose pupils finish their reading and their obedience together. Learning is no ornament here; it is the whole of what the town renders up.