Königsburg

"Rome prays for Heaven to write. We pray for Heaven to come. Once it came." — inscription on the base of the Stone of Mikahel

190,000 inhabitants, stagnant since 1880. Capital of Königsmark, seat of the Royal Church of the North and of the university Rome fears most.

Urban geography

Situation

• The head of the Fjord of Kron, an arm of the sea thirty kilometres long that comes in from the coast and ends in a basin of deep water ringed by walls of granite.
• An old military choice of ground: an enemy fleet that wants Königsburg has to run thirty kilometres of corridor with a fortress on both sides. None ever managed it.
• The city climbs from the water in terraces cut into the rock. There is no plain. Every street either goes up or goes down, and the streets that go up have a step in the middle.
• A deep-water port at the bottom of the fjord — the navy of the North anchors here, and in winter the fjord ice has to be broken daily by ram-boats.

Climate

Subarctic. A winter of seven months, near-total darkness in December and January, a short summer with the midnight sun in the high weeks. The city lives two years in every year: the year of indoors (fire, beer, library, silence) and the year of outdoors (march, building, military campaign, feast).

Canonical military implication: winter paralyses fighting on the Northern Line. Königsmark makes war in a single breath of summer, every year, and spends the whole winter planning the next one. That produced the most methodical general-staff culture on the continent.