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home | contents | previous | next | index Chapter 15 - Whitemill/GatehallNow that we know where the southern edge of the Pushta is, we can locate Whitemill: a little village called Whitemill at the southern edge of the Pushta ... the Whitemill Pike [turns] into the single road of the hamlet ... Whitemill was hundreds of miles from the nearest port ... the Empire had given control of the local canals to the Imperial navy ... The whole region lives off those canals, mostly for watering the fields ... "How far are we from the River?" In this part of the Empire, "the River" can only mean the Adrilankha River. / "About two leagues. From here, there's no need to take a navy barge if you're going that way." / "And the nearest dock?" / "Upriver half a mile." ... I could get [to Adrilankha from Whitemill] fast. Anyone in Adrilankha would take more than a month to reach me here, barring a teleport or access to a really efficient post system. But I was only a few days from Adrilankha; rivers work like that. ... Three days later I stepped off a boat onto North Market Pier Number Four in Adrilankha "More than a month" is at least 18 days. Since he makes the trip in 3 days, that means going downriver is at least 6 times faster than going upriver. The only way this observation makes sense to me is if he's talking about traveling on the river. If he were walking along the shore (or taking a road), I would expect the travel time to be the same either way. Since Whitemill is described as being "at the southern edge of the Pushta", and "two leagues" from the Adrilankha River, I located it 6 miles east of the Adrilankha River and due west of Wilder, which is also on the edge of the Pushta. That puts Whitemill about 320 miles from Adrilankha (as the jhereg flies; slightly longer if you follow the River), which works out to be about 18 miles a day going upriver. As far as the Whitemill Pike goes, there's no indication of what direction Vlad was coming from, only that he was on the Whitemill Pike and it "turned" into a road leading into Whitemill. My guess is that it runs north south, though, since it appears that there is a road that runs from Adrilankha to Gatehall and passes through/near Whitemill: My cousin is a post inspector, and ... he was passing through [Whitemill] on his way to Gatehall from Adrilankha It's possible that "post inspector" means he inspects fence posts, but I think his job is probably related to mail delivered using posts, so I think Gatehall is a post. I'm not sure if Undauntra's Highway is still in use in Vlad's time (Dragaera City is a Sea of Chaos in his time and definitely not a place anyone would want to go in a hurry), but the southeast is still populated, so I guessed that at least the southeastern portion of the Highway was still in use, and located Gatehall where Undauntra's Highway crosses the Adrilankha River. I think the Whitemill Pike runs from Adrilankha north to Gatehall on the eastern side of the Adrilankha River, passing near to Covered Springs and Whitemill along the way. home | contents | previous | next | index Questions? Comments? Please contact me at dragaera [at] bryann.net. Copyright © 2020 Bryan Newell, unless otherwise noted. |