Where the Moutray empties into Lake Prophyria, a delta of dozens of tiny islands rings with the song
Spacious gardens, avenues lined with linden and walnut, and a lack of fortifications gives Karcau an airiness unique to Ustalavic cities. Locally mined limestone, pale marsh woods, and an architectural love of arches, balconies, towers, and elaborate windows also aid in opening the city, filling the streets and structures with light. Yet the brightest light casts the darkest shadow, and Karcau hides an equal amount of darkness. Beneath the city streets lurk two interwoven subterranean networks, a system of waterlogged caverns partially reinforced, expanded, and repurposed as sewer tunnels. For centuries, these black walks have served as avenues for escaped criminals, debauched cultists, and unspeakable things from nameless depths.
Karcau rightly earns its epithet as the Village of Voices. Echoing across plazas and ringing through alleyways, the city’s musicians and hopeful apprentices practice almost endlessly—a local trait that many visitors find turns from charming to obnoxious with startling speed. What many in the south would consider opera dress invades the local fashion, with capes, long gloves, tall hats, and daring gowns accentuating daily wear. Yet even the most pretentious residents find it difficult to forget that their city sprawls at the edge of a particularly fetid swamp, as biting f lies and fat mosquitoes rise from Lake Prophyria’s algae-choked waters in pestilent waves. Thus, especially in the spring and summer months, Karcau fashions take on an air of mystery, with women donning ornate veils and men wearing masks.
Sites in Karcau
More than just theaters and recital halls fill the Village of Voices, many structures hiding tales darker than would ever be permitted on even the city’s most avant-garde stage.
Blaispear Plaza: Before the cold eyes of the Cloisoi Theater’s innumerable angels stand two dozen ornate granite pedestals. From these columns the posturing bronzes of Sinaria’s greatest heroes consider their beneficiaries, noble figures like Coalise, who lured the Graidemere Serpent to its doom; Jayde the Winged Warrior; the twins Guitad and Maidce standing against the morlock hordes; the Desnan priest, Adterly; and Silversong, the steed of the exiled poet Carmain Rowles. Amid these personalities also rest several vacant pedestals, waiting for future heroes.
The Eylusia Building: Home to Zeffiro Lesiege’s Eylusia company—purveyors of fine funeral experiences— morbid statuary and the organization’s symbol, a spiral of three red tears, make the tower look less like the headquarters of a wealthy business and more like some gigantic mausoleum. While the structure’s heights hold Lesiege’s personal penthouse, beneath hide laboratories where alchemists and necromancers plumb death’s darkest secrets, as well as shadowed passages reaching down into the city’s deepest tunnels.
The Karcau Opera: The Karcau Opera stands as the most prestigious school of the arts in northern Avistan. The Karcau Conservatory, the Livgrace Orchestra, the Dyemeir Opera House, the Museum of Song, and several staff and student boarding houses stand upon its campus near the city’s heart. Elegance and tradition characterize most outsiders’ vision of the college, but residents know the institute hides a darker side, and trade stories of secret passages, a submerged labyrinth, an exclusive ossuary for the remains of the school’s most celebrated alumni, and a hidden balcony where spectators from other worlds adore the greatest performers this world has to offer.
Starling House: Ancestral home of the Livgraces, Sinaria’s line of ruling counts, the grand manor’s pale stone walls grant it a spectral quality as it hides amid the cottonwoods and hanging moss across Echo’s Inlet from Karcau’s harbor. Countess Sasandra Livgrace holds court informally from the grim office of her father, the former count Birmienon, who also resides at the family’s home. The countess treats her childhood home as a personal sanctuary and often retreats to the house’s lofty widow’s walk to overlook her city and sometimes exercise her melodic voice. Despite being the most elegant home in Karcau, the estate is somewhat outdated, having no connection to the city sewer—a fact countess Livgrace takes inscrutable comfort in.
Tatterdemalion: The College of Fools prides itself as being the world’s foremost—and only—school of buffoonery. Teaching comedy as an art form, the small school’s curriculum ranges from puppetry and mime to the observational humor and satire common to jesters and harlequins. Hidden behind a small alleyway door marked only in faded motley, the fewer than two-dozen viciously competitive students and four instructors keep the college’s location a secret—as the only thing less funny than a joke half remembered is a comedian half trained. Tatterdemailon’s dean, the dwarfish puppet master Wim Ilomos, holds his students to high standards and resolutely views their craft as just as lofty as that practiced in any theater or opera house. Yet, in secret, Ilomos is losing control of his school to his albino, ever-smiling master of mime, Arlecht, priest of Karcau’s hidden and debauched cult of the infernal lord, Alichino.
Rumors in Karcau
Flitting through the city as swiftly and unignorably as its music, rumors quickly pass from gossip to gossip—those who fancy themselves as tellers of the moment’s tales.
Opera of Ghosts: Actors and their ilk being, by definition, a dramatic bunch, every stage in Karcau seems to host its own pantheon of ghostly divas, phantom tutors, and skeletal musicians. Although most are little more than stories to frighten backstage crewmen or boarding ballerinas, several have continued through generations, semi-regular sightings and even the occasional attributed death going far in granting such tales life. The city’s most notorious theatrical specters include: Mad Mad Margarette, the Cloisoi Theater’s envious makeup artist and hairdresser who slashed the throats of an entire chorus line before emerging on stage in a bloody gown; a troupe of singing skulls that roam the Karcau sewers; the Puppets of Padiralli, who coax children to their masterless stage; and the Dyemeir Opera House’s two most famous haunts, the Banshee Prince and his spectral audience, and the Veiled Mistress, a shadowy conductor, playwright, and patron who only appears hidden behind a mask or veil.
Sewer People: Some say the swamp folk have grown tired of living in the mosquito-infested Graidmere and have been spotted sailing their barges into the sewers beneath the city. Already many citizens claim to have seen human shadows moving below the sewer grates and heard shrieks of excesses that could only come from those peoples’ depraved rituals.