The masters don’t know, but two of the servants have come to love this task because it’s given them a chance to spend time together. Right now they’re considering running away and getting married. Their masters don’t know, because they aren’t listening for the words, only the noise. Only the comfort of illusion.

And that’s the real truth about this city; this planet. It saps you of the urgency to do what’s right. What good is one drop of water in the desert? How much energy will that cost me? What about my family? It won’t make any difference, anyway. Even the best hearts go dry, here.

Welcome to Tiers.

I sit in my chambers in the center of town. Upper Town, that is. Twenty feet from my bedroom window, the edge of the town drops off sharply in the south, along the edge of the cliff. The sheer rock face plummets for about fifty feet before hitting the next tier down. This happens six times before you reach the major cliff, over which the waterfall plummets. Below that cliff is Low Town. Not Lower Town, no. The extra two letters would cost more ink when drawing maps, and nothing and no one in that part of Tiers is worth two extra letters of ink. Low Town is arranged the same way, in clusters of tiers. These are rougher and less uniform. We’ve got plenty of room to stretch up here in Upper Town, but down there the people and buildings cling to the cliffside for dear life, or what passes for dear life down there. The city could easily widen the tiers for them to allow some breathing space or even, perish the thought, install a guardrail to stop the occasional accidental fatal plummet, but who wants to spend the money?

And that’s really what Tiers is all about, you see: money. The rest of the galaxy depends on the resources from Tiers in order to build their homes, wage their wars, house the orphans that result, and build barracks for those orphans when they’re ready for the next cycle. Wood, mostly, is what gets exported from here -- a special wood called ripplewood which lights up with expanding rings of every color when pressure is applied to it. The greatest export is the white ceramic material, Sivernite, named for the planet. Sivernite is made from a dense clay that needs to be worked by skilled nano-mages and harmonized to exactly the right frequency as it’s fired. But Sivern, and its capital city Tiers, also exports stone, wool, animal skins, flesh, and just about any other commodity the Terran Empire figures out how to market to the people of the galaxy.

When there aren’t enough workers, the city imports more slaves. Don’t get the wrong idea. Slaves aren’t worked to death here. No, that would be an unnecessary expense, and it’s considered scandalous to engage in such decadence as slave killing. But… yes, it does happen. Of course it does.