The hill crested and Lanjaar happened all at once.
Anthierin leaned forward without deciding to. Her hands found the carriage window frame and stayed there.
It was big. Not the careful bigness of a capital city that had been planned and measured and built to impress — the sprawling, accidental bigness of a place that had kept growing because people kept arriving and nobody had told them to stop. Half the skyline was scaffolding. Rooftops at different heights argued with each other about which direction the city was supposed to face. Smoke climbed from a dozen forges in the industrial quarter, mixing with cookfire smoke and the particular haze of a city that ran too hot and too loud to ever fully cool down.
Somewhere in the middle of it — no, not the middle, nothing about Lanjaar suggested a middle — a tower rose.
