Kaport Bay

Kaport Bay is the most rugged of North Province's towns, a whaling station and fishing town of 5,200 souls. Together with its twin satellite villages of Low and High Scarport, this town has a characteristic atmosphere. The people here are hardy men and women with little time for frivolity—or outsiders. They term themselves "Kaport landers" and are proud of this. Flan blood is strong, and the Kaportlanders are no friends of Grenell and his court.

Kaport Bay maintains three stout war galleys used to protect its whaling fleet, not least against the attacks of deep sea kraken in the Solnor Ocean. Barbarians rarely raided here in the past, given their blood ties with the fair-haired Kaportlanders, and they do not do so now. Kaport Bay remains a place unto itself, allying formally with no one. It is a town where a man's word is his bond (unlike the barbarians, few folk here are chaotic). Thieves are strung up on gibbets more or less on sight. Demihu mans are absent from the town, and are regarded with curiosity and suspicion (as are all outsiders). Kaport Bay's ruler, Prince Anxann, is the nominal head of the Torquann House in this area, with many cousins and siblings ruling the coastal lands around Kaport Bay. Ivid did not trust Anxann to give the Sea Barons proper support during the wars and had him made into an animus. Now, Anxann plans the overthrow of Ivid, but he has one obsession which confines him to his gloomy clifftop keep with his personal bodyguard of knights. Anxann is convinced that astrology is the only way to predict when, and how, Ivid can be overthrown. He has become very reliant on a complete charlatan, Zwingell, who makes all manner of predictions pertaining to "The Dancer of Swords in the Heavens," "The Singing Sisters of Revenge in the constellation of the Druid," and the like. Zwingell lives in luxury and continues to milk this for all its worth; by sheer luck, he predicted one major storm in Readying and by confining the whaling vessels to port Anxann probably saved at least two or three large ships. Thus, none can question Zwingell's skills—at least for the time being.

Thus, Kaport Bay is much the way it was before the wars, since Anxann broods within his keep and rarely emerges from it. The stone town is gray, and hardly possesses much excitement for those used to city life, but it does have one singular and striking feature.

A century or so ago, a skilled enchanter worked with a dwarven architect to construct a set of sluices and wheels which channelled sea water at high tide into a complex apparatus which desalinated the water (providing drink ing water and salt for export) and also raised the water through a permanent reverse gravity effect. Tumbling through a huge set of water wheels, the water now provides the motive force for an automated whale flensing apparatus. Sea captains simply insert a whale at one end (more or less) and the whale emerges separated into its useful components (meat and blubber, blood and oil, bone, etc.) at the other. Other coastal towns have attempted to duplicate this strange machine; the ruins of a few of the less spectacularly unsuccessful attempts can be seen at the Scarport villages.