Luna's civic works

From the books

Sewers and the service aqueduct

Luna's sewers can be entered through maintenance hatches, such as one behind a butcher's shop, and the tunnels beyond stand ankle-deep in filth that smells of old meat and urine. Ferrin Stonecleaver's service aqueduct opens off them and climbs to the Luminarite Gallery of the Radiant Bank. Ferrin calls it his own design and his "little back door", and admits he never told the elves he had left it open. He laid the brick tunnel himself some fifty years before The Outcast Knight, when he was still proud to serve the crown.

The slums have no such order. Their alleys smell of stagnant water and smoke, and their crooked buildings lean so far over the narrow streets that the upper floors almost touch.

The Underways

The Channeler calls the whole hidden network beneath the city Luna's Underways: sewers, drains, service roads, sealed chapels and the deeper workings of the Lightspire. Many people know one fragment of it, but almost no one knows the whole map. The Fae tithe road bends away before the city walls and drops into an old service cut between chalk cliffs and drainage stone. Its gates open without a sound and lead into white service corridors, locked devotional doors and passages built for prisoners, relics and bodies.

Within this network the book names a drainage chapel below the Spire, a drainage stair, the Festival cisterns and old lamp-pipes under the streets. There is also a drainage cut hidden behind a devotional wall, and a servants' stair that should have been sealed fifty years earlier. When the Lower Sanctum's wards falter, old drains shift their flow through unused passages.

Walls and defences

When Eamon's thralls attacked during the Festival of Light, outer barricades went up in the streets and Astarion drew the last ring of defences around the residential district. The thralls climbed the residential walls by every crack in the stone, and the defenders answered them with volleys of luminarite arrows.

The dead

Oakren lies in an old graveyard among leaning stones and dead grass. It is entered through an old gate whose roof has broken open to the sky, and a loose iron fence rattles somewhere in the wind. His grave has no headstone, only a single iron nail driven into the earth as his mark.

After the demon's assault, the dead in the ruined castle courtyard were dragged into rows with luminarite dust poured between them. Astarion ordered every corpse burned at once, either thrown over the side or put on the pyres. The thralls' bodies were burned on prepared pyres, where luminarite salt turned the flames a clear white.