INDUSTRY IN THE CITY

The City is famous for many things: its criminals, its wines, its factions and its might. But what it is perhaps best known for is its industry, which pours forth machines of iron and creations of brass, and spews a thick chocking fog that covers the City is darkly as the its black moral fog, penetrating the pores of the City and its people.

Industry has always been a part of the City, certainly ever since the establishment of the Hammerites, whose power is based on the secure foundations that their industry built for them. The industrial areas of the City are predominantly based on its western side, near to the mines of coal, iron ore and precious metals that are its life-blood. The River flows from the mountains where these mines are, allowing the raw materials to be floated to the factories, and then the finished goods to be trans-shipped to the warehouses of Dayport, Eastport and the Docks. Due to the presence of the coal in the Mountains, the power plants that supply the City with its power are located by the sprawling mass of industry where their power is in great demand.

The main industry present in the City is the mining and refining of iron ore into iron and thus to steel, and the attendant and linked industries that utilise the steel and the slag. There exist many blast furnaces, some capable of reducing tons of iron ore a day, that consume with voracious hunger the resources of the mountains. Iron ore is mined and shipped to the furnaces in barges, as is the coal. Limestone is plentiful in the cliffs to the north and south of the east side of the City, and is shipped upriver in barges that carry the finished steel to the warehouses. The furnaces burn tons of coal a day, resulting in clouds of ash that spread far and wide over the City, blown there by the prevailing wind, and hang in the air on even the brightest of days. The ash dirties buildings and chokes the inhabitants, and covers the area with a pall of smoke and darkness.

The steel produced after the iron has been tapped out of the blast furnace is put to many uses. There exist several shipyards along the river that employ the steel in the new generation of river- and ocean-going craft, although such ships are large and unwieldy, and cannot yet compete with the wind-driven barges and ships that carry most of the City’s marine trade. The iron is also formed into girders, and often used in the construction of buildings in the City, as structural reinforcement.

Smaller scale uses of the iron also exist. Workshops in the industrial areas buy the iron, and hammer it into