Mapping Alt Coulumb (Part 1)

Love them or hate them, maps are a staple of most fantasy literature. Sadly, they are missing from the Craft Sequence novels, and I’ve not been able to find any online either official or unofficial, for any of our locations.

So, much like the development of this website in general - guess it’s up to me.

HUGE disclaimer before we start: I am neither an artist nor a mapmaker; my thing is words, words, and more words. So, forgive the basicness of the ‘maps’ in this article. They are built of basic shapes, and will most assuredly not be to scale. If you have the requisite skills and interest, you are very welcome to improve upon the foundations I’ve built here. In fact, I highly encourage it.

Alt Coulumb: rough layout

As the main setting in Three Parts Dead and Four Roads Cross, all of our information on Alt Coulumb comes from a close reading of these books. We get the basics of layout and aesthetic in Three Parts Dead, but the city was properly developed in Four Roads Cross.

Alt Coulumb is a major city on the eastern coast of Northern Kath, a continent analogous to North America. The largest trading centre on that coastline, it sees two-thirds of all cargo that crosses from Old World to New (Three Parts Dead, 25-26). The sea is not named in these books, but from later instalments we can extrapolate that it is called the World Sea.

Alt Coulumb is often compared in fandom spaces to real world New York City; however, to me it reads like an amalgamation of NYC and Washington DC. The city layout is part of my reason for the latter, but in terms of Alt Coulumb’s location we only have to look at this description from Four Roads Cross:

Alt Coulumb’s founders in their infinite wisdom built their city on a marsh—that was one reason, said the city’s oldest myths, their land came so cheap. Rivers still ran beneath the pavement and underground, but pave a swamp and you’re left with a paved swamp. Four Roads Cross, 32

Washington DC is often (erroneously, it turns out) described as having been built on a swamp, with disgustingly hot and humid summers, so this also fits. (I mean, for a northern European, NYC is also hot and humid in the summer, but my East Coast friends assure me DC is far, far worse.)

As we don’t know the rest of the natural geography of the east coast of Northern Kath, this NYC / DC distinction doesn’t really matter. But in my mind, I’m putting it in between the two - on the coast like NYC, but further south like DC.

Alt Coulumb has a harbour, and is surrounded on at least the west side by forest. It is hot and humid in the summers, with clear skies in the autumn - the only seasons we’ve seen so far. The wood is named the Geistwood in Four Roads Cross, and we learn it is where the gargoyles sheltered Seril for four decades.

(Well, in Three Parts Dead Aev says they hid in forests ‘far from home’ but then in Four Roads Cross they say they were sheltered in the Geistwood, which is right outside the city so this either hyperbole on Aev’s part or a retcon on Gladstone’s.)

Alt Coulumb is a metropolis with millions of residents. It’s filled with skyscrapers and multi-storey tenements, so doesn’t seem to have the level of urban sprawl we see in Dresediel Lex. The rough layout of the city is illustrated early in Three Parts Dead:

At Alt Coulumb’s heart, the press of humanity and architecture yielded to a green circle half a mile in diameter: the Holy Precinct, with the towering Sanctum of Kos at its heart. To the north it bordered the business district, where skeletal mages in flowing robes bargained with creatures from beyond the mortal world in towers of black glass that scraped the sky. To the south lay the university campuses, gentrified, upper-class, and comfortably distinct from the machinations of Northtown. East and west spread the no-man’s land between the poles, home to residential zones, slums, dives, and vice.
The most notorious of these regions, the Pleasure Quarters, actually abutted the Holy Precinct, a holdover from centuries past when some saint decreed that the fire in the blood and loins belonged to Kos Everburning as much as the fire of hearth and furnace. Three Parts Dead, 56

We can therefore create a very rough outline of Alt Coulumb with the Sanctum of Kos bang in the centre.

I imagine that in reality the Sanctum wouldn’t be completely centre hundreds of years after it was first built, as the city has space to expand in three directions but not to the east due to the sea, but for the purposes of this article we’ll keep it central.

The Sanctum of Kos is an impressive black stone tower in the Holy Precinct, which is itself “bisected and trisected” by long roads and white gravel paths. It’s unclear whether there are any other buildings in the Holy Precinct or just the Sanctum - which is, admittedly, huge and could easily hold all priests, visitors, secular staff and more with no difficulty.

Alt Coulumb isn’t quite so perfectly designed (as will be shown in our next article) but it’s such a key point of the city that I am again using DC as an influence. I may be somewhat biased as DC is the only place I’ve spend considerable time in the US. But it works and this is my website, so we’re going with it.

Alt Coulumb: the westside

In terms of city layout, that’s really all we get in Three Parts Dead - which takes place over only three days, with our main POV character not being local. From the very start of Four Roads Cross, we get more of a sense of the city; Tara has lived there for a year now, and all other POV characters are locals or long-term residents. In particular we are introduced to the Paupers’ Quarter, where Tara now lives, and some specific neighbourhoods within the Quarter - specifically Hot Town, Slaughter’s Fell, and the area around the Market Place. We also hear about the Ash, a destroyed area along the edge of the Paupers’ Quarter and Business District.

Alt Coulumb’s hardest harshest parts lay to its west and north, between the Paupers’ Quarter and the glass towers of the ill-named Central Business District—a broken-down region called the Ash, where last-century developments left to crumble during the Wars never quite recovered, their land rights tied up in demoniacal battles. Twenty-storey stone structures rose above narrow streets, small compared to the modern glass and steel needles north and east, but strong. Four Roads Cross, 21

We also know where Hot Town falls in the Paupers’ Quarter thanks to a useful description from gargoyle Aev:

Aev flew east and south along the Hot Town strip, skyscrapers to her left, brownstones and tenements to her right. Fountains of ghostlight erupted at irregular intervals from gridded streets. […] Ahead of her rose the Temple of Kos in the centre of the green: an enormous black needle that burned in the vision of the heart. Four Roads Cross, 49-50

The Ash and Hot Town are therefore both described as being between the Paupers’ Quarter proper and the Business District; we also see Tara go to the Ash through Hot Town.

Tara approached on foot by daylight through the Hot Town. Kids loitered at alley mouths, hands in the pockets of loose sweatshirts, hoods drawn up in spite of the heat. Sidewalk sweepers stared at her, as did women smoking outside bars with dirty signs. Girls played double dodge on a cracked blacktop.
But when she reached the Ash, she was alone. Not even beggars lingered in these shadows. Four Roads Cross, 21

We’re not given much detail on the location of Slaughter’s Fell, the district where Abelard and Cat grew up, so I’ve put it towards the south of the Quarter. The few locations we know of in the Paupers’ Quarter, such as Tara’s apartment and the market, will be placed in our next article.

Alt Coulumb: the eastside

The eastside is the only part of the city we spend much time in during Three Parts Dead. Tara and Elayne approach the city from the sea, and given Alt Coulumb’s status as a trading city there are docks which stretch quite a significant way along the coastline. The main section seems to be a bustling market, and further north becomes derelict and dangerous. We see little, if anything, of the south.

She ran down the gangplank to the docks, past the Blacksuit corden into a haze of spice and silk and shouted sales pitches. Four Roads Cross, 249
Shale came to rest at a warehouse three piers north of the Kell’s Bounty’s mooring.
This was a dead and dangerous strip of city, where bleak talon-scarred buildings faced the night with shattered windows and broken doors. Dim streetlights illuminated loading docks strewn with rotted timber and decayed canvas. Three Parts Dead, 241

The only bit of town that is described as being on the east side other than the docks is the Pleasure Quarter. It feels somewhat unlikely to me that this takes up the entirety of the eastside - and we also hear that the Pleasure Quarter is the most notorious of the regions to east and west, not the only - but we have no other information for what belongs here. Our only piece of additional information is Cat “[reaching] the edge of the broad ring road at the Quarter’s edge”, but not saying which edge. As it’s a ring road, I’ve put it as circling the outer edge of the Quarter at the furthest point from where it abuts the Holy Precinct. This also gives us scope to expand the ring road into a full ring around the city should we get further information later.

Alt Coulumb: apparently there’s a river?

Somewhat confusingly, in Four Roads Cross we get a reference to a river we never hear about before or after, other than that brief reference early in Three Parts Dead to goods being carried along the river to the rest of the continent.

The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Four Roads Cross, 109

In my experience, rivers tend to be a significant feature of the cities they are in, with settlements often springing up on river banks, and it seems odd that we never hear or see it otherwise. It’s also unclear where this river is in the city. Given the layout of the Pleasure Quarter (more info on that in the next article), I don’t think it goes through there, which means probably northside or southside. The line above comes when Aev and Shale are having an aerial chase around the city, so the location is unclear.

Here I have taken the biggest liberty of the map. Having grown up in a city with two rivers that shaped its history, I’m giving Alt Coulumb two rivers - one northside, one southside. There is zero evidence for this, but I like it, and there’s no evidence specifically contradicting it.

And that’s all we get for general layout, so this is our final map overview for this article.

Next time we’ll zoom in on a few areas and work out a rough street plan, identifying approximate locations for some key locations seen in Three Parts Dead and Four Roads Cross. Stay tuned for that article coming hopefully very soon.

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And if you have artistic skills you would like to use to improve upon these maps, we’d love to hear from you.