Soaring towers and stately manors shape Eastgate’s skyline, along with the great living monument of the Grand Holt, but most of its homes are modest villas and townhouses. Much of Eastgate is residential, and its people tend to be hardworking, secure but not wealthy, and fiercely proud of their neighborhoods. The streets are clean and safe, the parks quiet and green, the fashions respectable but never flashy. Eastgate is where Absalom’s poor and working-class people aspire to live because it represents an ideal of dignity and ease that seems more comfortably familiar, and more attainable, than the alien world of aristocrats and foreign grandees. To someone who grew up hard in the Docks or the Coins, making it to Eastgate means making good.

Most Eastgaters make their livings elsewhere in the city. Rickshaws and carriages whisk a constant flow of commuters away to work, and some employers even hire elephants to carry their employees. It can take hours to navigate the city’s streets each day—a highly unusual arrangement in a place where most people reside much closer to their workplaces—but Eastgaters consider the trade-off well worth it, since their district is so much safer and more affordable than living in comparable luxury anywhere else in the city.