part seven, page one

Very nice first page for issue #7. I can’t wait to see page two.

Reply

Er… color me confused. WHAT docks?

Al-Rashad is located INLAND. The docks are explicitly outside of the city walls; we see that when Alric is unloaded from his slave ship and marched overland to the city, and we’re seeing it now as these things pop up out of the water and come at it overland.

Al’Rashad is actually a port city located on the mouth of the River Rashad, which itself enters into a large, narrow inlet. The city is basically built into a mountain.

The Slaver’s Docks seen in chapter one are located about an hour away from the city; it was a sort of compromise Jandal and Apli engineered between the anti-slave and pro-slave factions of Rashadi politics to keep tensions at a low simmer: this way the slavers get to keep slaving but they have to do so at much greater expense (even to the point of there being a specific gate, the Slaver’s Gate, that slave companies have to pay taxes for the city to maintain). All of the other city’s maritime trade happens right at the city proper (and since this is a very large and very rich city, there is quite a lot of it).

If you go look at Book One, page 26, when Alric first sees the city, he’s coming through a mountain pass in the mountains you can see in the foreground of this page’s first panel which ring both the city and the river. Basically, those mountains go around the city (on the left hand side). The plains south (where they’re looking) are the only flatland by which an overland army could reasonably invade, beyond those specific mountain passes large enough to bring an army through which Rayana was checking in the last book in the Bayid Tower.

Reply

Your explanation makes sense, I suppose, but in that case why did this massive army of the undead crawl up out of the ocean a couple hours away from the city? Rather gives up the element of surprise, don’t it? Shouldn’t they have just crawled straight up into the city?

I would refer you to Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s Empire: sometimes, you want people to know that you know they can see you coming, and that you don’t care.

Reply