Qal Sahid

Desert on every horizon and a single river valley through the middle of it, green in a hard line that stops where the last channel stops. Everything the Sahid Empire eats comes off that valley floor. Everything it believes comes from the distance between the valley floor and the sand ten paces away.

The irrigation is old, enormous, and maintained by the state as a military function rather than a civil one. Canals are surveyed by officers. A silted channel is treated the way another realm treats a breached wall, and the man responsible for it is dealt with the same way. This is the origin of the garden argument in its literal form: the Sahid have watched exactly what happens to good ground when the hands holding it get weak, because they can see it from the city gate.

Qal Sahid governs by circuit and the circuits begin here, in a capital laid out as a parade ground with a city grown around it. Inspectors ride out without notice and come back without ceremony. No governor anywhere in the world has ever been asked how his province is doing, and the practice was invented in this valley, watching water.