Chimus sits in the open on the southern plains, and that is the whole point of it. Ve's second-largest city, around forty thousand strong, it was laid out to be looked at: broad straight avenues a parade can march down, marble government halls visible from a day's ride out, sightlines that funnel a visitor toward the imperial precinct and let him see how rich the empire is on the way in. Nothing about it is hidden, because a hidden capital cannot do the job this one was built for. Chimus exists to be read, by envoys, by rival powers, and by the empire's own subjects, as proof that Chimea is a civilization and not a band of cave-exiles who got lucky with conquest.
The joke the Fieri court will not make out loud is that the Fieri are exactly that. The people who rule Chimea are halflings of Hell Creek, born under the magma a long way from here, raised in heat that would kill a surface dweller and in cities that are warrens of glowing stone with no horizon and no sky. Chimus is the opposite of everything a Fieri finds comfortable. It is cold by their standards and painfully bright by day, built upward and outward where their instinct is to build down and in. The court keeps it anyway, and keeps a residence under it warmed against the plains chill, because the display is worth the discomfort. A people who were told for centuries that they were cursed underground built the most aggressively above-ground capital on the continent to settle the argument.
The Avenue of Tribute on a procession day. The marble underfoot is veined a dull red, quarried that color on purpose, and the gem-merchants' fronts along it are faced in cut Blood Mountain stone set behind glass so the light catches it. A Fieri official walks the center of the avenue under a parasol, raised against the sun rather than the rain, squinting at a sky his grandparents never saw. The crowds are mostly other peoples. The empire that built this street to be admired imported most of the admirers.
Everything the city displays comes up from somewhere worse. Chimus produces almost nothing itself; it is a destination, the place the three legions' tribute and the conquered provinces' wealth converge to be spent on looking imperial. The brightest thread in that flow is the Blood Mountain gem trade. Rubies, cut copper, and worked iron come south from the occupied range, get finished and sold in the Avenue of Tribute, and pay for the marble and the parades. The trouble is that the seam at the far end of that thread has turned expensive. The occupation in the Blood Mountains has settled into a grinding three-way fight between the Second Legion, the Aureum resistance, and the Bloodlings of the deep caves, and the gem flow stutters every time the deep takes another shift of miners. The court in Chimus would rather not hear the details. Its whole self-image is a display funded by a war it has decided to treat as a settled cost, and the cost is no longer behaving.
Chimus is also where the empire's restlessness points outward. The colonial traffic to Rimihuica, the soldiers and convicts and redemption-colonists bound for New Chimea across the sea, does not embark from the capital; it gathers and grieves in Old Tyabb to the west before shipping out from Port Vincent. But the appetite that sends them is decided here, in the precinct at the head of the Avenue of Tribute, by a court that measures the empire's health in how much new ground it can claim. As long as there is somewhere further to expand, the display holds. The question the marble does not answer is what Chimus becomes the year the expansion stops paying for it.
That question is being argued in the precinct right now, and it has a shape. The ground the court most wants is Phriorys, the open dragon-held hills on the southern border, and the empire has marched on them three times and been thrown back three times; the Three Repulsions sit in the records as failures the court refuses to read as a limit. The loudest voice for a fourth march is the war-minister Hollin Emberling, a survivor of the third who watched the dragon Pyaganos hunt his own men for sport and argues for going back anyway, heavier. Against him stands the treasury seat, Wessa Wickling, who disputes the bill, not the pride: the Blood Mountain gem flow that pays for the marble and the parades has begun to stutter as the occupation grinds, and her bloc counts every legion promised to Phriorys against a revenue that is already short. The display was always funded by the next conquest. Wickling's argument is that the arithmetic has stopped working, and the marble has no answer for that either.