"I guess we'll have to find out. I'll keep an eye on that."

"I suppose we can head out, then?"

"I can't think of anything else we need to cover so yes."

"Right. Then let's go."

One other guard comes with, but neither guard is acting on edge. Maybe curiously, they're both wearing brown coats instead of black today, and not projecting 'intimidating'.

They head out west and north - "Our destinations are about due north from here, but the river's at its widest point so there aren't direct bridges and I'm choosing the route further from the elves." - through a district that wouldn't be called a slum but clearly is poor.

The people are mostly a slightly different ethnicity. Darker skin, darker, bushier hair, eyes slightly narrower. Shorter, if that's not just malnutrition. Some of the guards at the townhouse were from that race but most of them were the 'whiter' type, as are Teodor and the other one with them.

"Makes sense."

The skin tone thing is a slightly uncomfortable parallel but it's none of his business. Apparently they're acting as the equivalent of plainclothes officers.

Rodney discretely checks his scanner a couple times as they walk.

Not much on the scanner; people have souls, the balance of energies changes frequently in space and time. If it's tracking population statistics about the people he might notice something eventually.

As they get closer to the mouth of the river and slowly veer north, the distant sound of metal on metal and faint smell of fire and gunpowder will creep in. From further west. Also they'll see a narrow island to the north and a larger one to the northeast.

"Is this some sort of industrial district?"

"We're passing near the cannonworks; most ship cannons for this part of the sea are made and sold here. I'd rather pass it by."

Not that he expects it would actually be risky in any way to let these people with extremely sophisticated guns and near-magic scanner-books to see the current state of cannon production in Kislev, but if he was wrong he would feel very stupid and have to defend it to his lady and his tzarina.

"I would be surprised if you did. Seems reasonable to keep people under suspicion away from weapons foundries."

"Indeed. It's not like you'd learn much, I'm sure."

As they get closer the neighborhood gets better-off, and slightly more Gospodar (the whiter people). Also there's a much wider swathe of people of completely different nationalities. European-looking, almost universally, mostly the German-Austrian-Dutch cluster but there's some French and Spanish and a handful of Italians and Greeks. Nearly all of them sailors but a few look like merchants and some are sooty and smell like they've come from the gunworks.

They'll get pretty close before they turn due north along a boulevard and then a bridge. The narrow island looks significantly more wealthy, and up ahead the bigger island is both much more built-up and wealthier still.

Cities having wealthier and poorer areas is pretty much inevitable as far as John knows. Atlantis doesn't but that isn't really a fair comparison it was all built at once as far as he knows.

"This island is the old city, where most of the city government and royal influence sits. We can cut through the cloth market, if you want to see the oldest architecture; some of it dates back to before the conquest and founding."

"Sounds interesting. How long ago are we talking?"

"Nearly a thousand years now. 992 years from Tzarina Shoika's crowning is this summer solstice. Erengrad was conquered earlier that year, and the cloth market's mostly in Norvard, the Ungol city it was built from."

He guides them slightly east; there's another set of walls around this core city, which do not look ceremonial, though they're only very lightly manned.

"That's a long history there." Not too long compared to some places in Europe or China let alone Atlantis but he's American, they don't have nearly that kind of history.

The walls are a little weirder but they're not that different from the fences around important government buildings back home. 

"The Empire's twice as old, though they've had some very long civil wars and I'm not sure it's continuous in any sense other than the elector's weapons of office and their allegiance to Sigmar."

They pass through a gate, where the big gold coin comes out of a pocket briefly and gets them waved through.

This is a wealthy area, and much more the darker-skinned group (Ungols) than the Gospodar. The buildings are mostly not incredibly old, but the style is distinctly different; none of the onion domes and more curving roofs and rounder buildings which evoke a tent.

So he was wrong about wealth being strongly divided on ethnic lines. "Interesting building style."

"It's one of the few built-up places which is still mostly Ungol; most of them are still in the north and nomadic, or in tiny stanitsas; the other cities and towns are mainly Gospodar. Most of this isn't ancient, of course, but they match the style where they can."

There's still a lot of foreigners in the cloth market, and a lot of variation in the products.

He looks over the fabrics. He's expecting a mix of both higher and lower quality fabrics than back home but generally in relatively low amounts.

"Makes sense people tend to care a lot about preserving their culture."

It's a lot by contemporary standards, but yes, not relative to anyone with the Jacquard loom.

"In most ways we're one country, but yes, there are still large differences in other ways. The boyars* like it that way."

Going along the inside of the inner walls takes them east and north, into another district where the foreigners are rarer and the buildings more of a mix of styles, less rich (about like the small island) and still mostly Ungol.

*Hereditary nobility, as opposed to nominally-elected ones or the tzars

"I'm not surprised politics is like that."

"We're still better than some. Most, even. And the tzarina has been trying to elevate some of the Ungols to power, which would help. But it's not a place I'm proud of us."

They approach another gate and a lot more of the French-looking guys show up. Most are in relatively poor health even by the standards of those around them. A few have chainmail and steel helmets, better health, escorts of several others looking servile, and some of the haughtiest expressions you've ever seen.

"Speaking of the 'most', we're passing the Bretonnian Quarter now. It's mostly their lower classes who serve on ships and get here, but you can recognize the few nobility demonstrating their legal right to wear plate armor. Even when there's no danger nearby to make it useful."

"I wouldn't expect plate armor to be that useful with guns around. I suppose you don't have armor piercing rounds if you're still using muskets though."

"Rodney."