Scaldwell

Scaldwell is the camp around the scalding springs at the heart of the northern underworld, and the springs are the town: heat, clean water and worked warmth in a realm that has none of the three by nature. The deep roads bend to touch it, the fungal farms terrace its steam, and its bath-houses are the underworld's neutral ground, where feuds are boiled out by custom and the deep folk and the down-born trade news naked and unarmed. The springs have been running hotter this decade, which Scaldwell advertises as prosperity and its engineers log as a question: something below the north is stoking, and the town is living on the warmth of it.