Kalpa Imperial by Ursula K. Le Guin LAngelica Gorodischer

stone or sand, it doesn’t matter: the point is to go up, up as far as possible. They succeed, as you might expect. The mountains are buried under walls, balconies, terraces, parks; a square slants down, separated from a steep drop by stone arcades; the third floor of a house is the basement of another that fronts on the street above; the west wall of a government building adjoins the ironwork around the courtyard of a school for deaf girls; the cellars of a functionary’s grand mansion become the attics of a deserted building, while a cat-flap, crowned with an architrave added two hundred years later, serves as a tunnel into a coalhole, and a shelf has become the transept for a window with golden shields in the panes, and the skylight doesn’t open on the sky but on a gallery of waterwheels made of earthenware. A street that winds now up, now down, ends abruptly in a widow’s garden; a marketplace opens into a temple, and the cry of the seller of copper pots blends with the chants of the priest; the windows of a hospital ward for the dying open onto an ex-convict’s grog shop; the druggist has to cross the library of the Association of Master Stevedores in order to take a bath; a curly palm growing in the office of a justice of the peace reaches outside the building through a gap in the stonework. There are no vehicles because nothing wider than a man’s shoulders can get through the streets, which means that fat people and people carrying big loads have a terrible time even getting to the butcher’s to buy some nice tender lamb for next day’s dinner.
    And it wasn’t founded by the sword of a hero nor the sacrifice of a virgin, and it never was called Queen of the Dawn. Down there in the catacombs, currently painted with glow-in-the-dark colors, where dissolute teenagers dance and people who’re going to die get drunk—down there, when the Empire was young and struggling to unite, lived outlaws, smugglers, and assassins; and from there a mule-path led over the mountains and across the marshes to cities and towns where these gentlemen practiced their noble professions. Alas for the wretched beauty of the truth!
    A bit up the hill from the mouth of the catacombs stood a palace belonging to a person you’ve all heard of though you don’t know anything about him: Drauwdo the Brawny. It wasn’t really a palace but a big, ill-shaped, lopsided shed, wide and low-roofed, windowless, with an opening on the south side that you had to crawl into on all fours, a huge fireplace inside, and all round it a ditch filled with sharpened stakes pointing upward.
    Drauwdo was stupid, cruel, ignorant, and vain, and these qualities caused his downfall. Yet in his own way he was strong, valiant, and these qualities brought him briefly and violently to the top. He captained the outlaws and assassins; and around him, though not thanks to him, a ragged band took shape, that used assault and murder to get what they wanted—clothes, food, furniture, gold—above all, gold. The chief handed out rewards, a woman, an extra handful of jewels, a piece of land. And his followers imitated the chief and built stone houses, if you can call them houses, though most of the bunch went on huddling in the caves and tunnels.
    One of the not uncommon learnéd and progressive emperors one day leaned over a map of the Empire and by one banal gesture ended the ascendancy of Drauwdo the Brawny, the stupid, the vain, the cruel, the in-his-own-way valiant.
    “Here,” the emperor said, and put his manicured, bejeweled finger on a spot on the coastline of a cold and foggy sea far to the north. He looked at his engineers and geologists and the captains of his merchant marine and went on, “If we build a port here, transporting merchandise to the east will be much quicker and cheaper.”
    So the engineers and geologists set to work, the ship-captains waited, and Drauwdo, though he didn’t know it, was doomed.
    They laid out a road from the far-off capital to