Anzar was bonded wild by an outrider in the last decades of the Dark Era, and when the Guild came to Valreka in the reconstruction it had no whale and so no ground, while the rising house of Anzar had a half-empty back. The Guild took rooms as a paying tenant. It grew until the hall was the district.

In 2287 MR a bad crossing and a sand-fever took the Anzar guides inside a year, and the last of the blood was a child of six. The wardens' custom for an unguided whale is to take the people off and give her to the sand, since she drifts from the herd within a season. The Guild refused. For nine years its adventurers kept an unbonded whale with the herd by hand, riding her hide, turning her with Stokkul, feeding her at every halt, and forty-one of them died doing it. The child, Tasa ult Anzar, took the bond at fifteen and gave up her seat among the houses in the same week, declaring herself and her heirs the Guild's. Her blood still guides Anzar, as a whale requires, but as sworn Guild members on a Guild wage, the bond-line, holding no seat and sitting no council. The whale went on. The house stopped.

A whale's back is built the way every district in the herd is built: the wrights frame a deck onto the hide-cradle along the spine, where the back is broadest and stillest, and building spreads down the flanks from there. The spine is the prime ground, the flanks are cheaper and slope, and the head and the tail move too much for anything but what has to be there. Nothing on a whale goes high, since a tall building is a lever on a living animal, so a district sprawls and never climbs.

The Whalehall proper is one low accreted complex along the spine from the shoulder to amidships, grown in layers over four centuries and never planned once. Its oldest core is the dead house's own hall, the Tigemmi, which the Guild rented rooms in as a tenant in the 2150s; the Sovereign's rooms are in it today, so the Guild sits in the seat of the house it refuses to be. Around the Tigemmi the Guild added the entry hall, the Bank hall and the archive, each joined to the last by covered walks and roof-gangways, until the whole reads as one knot of halls a clerk can cross without touching the deck. When the hall needed more room the plots beside it were already taken, so it built where there was space: the dormitories went astern, the hospice and the training yard down the port flank, the Post yard down the starboard, and the pens took the stern. Each annex has its own gangway back to the hall, so the Whalehall is one building the way a hand is one thing.

A Godshall generates a small economy by existing, and on Anzar it has four quarters. Smiths' Flank, starboard and downwind of the hall: armourers, farriers for Stokkul tack, fletchers, and the outfitters who sell sand-gear and water-skins to parties who arrived without either. The Rows, astern of the hall on the spine: drinking halls beyond the Guild's own taproom, each with its own rank of custom; the gambling houses, where Overlade is played for stakes the taproom would frown at; and the boarding houses where Roll parties lodge when they have not chosen a house's whale. Hospice Row, port flank, under the Guild hospice: healers, apothecaries, a bone-setter, and the one shrine of Tani on Anzar, kept by a single priest sent over from Lenama. The Brokers' Walk, beside the entry hall: appraisers and relic-brokers, since Anzar is the first whale an outsider reaches and the natural place for what the digs lift to meet a buyer, and the scribes and letter-writers who work the Post.

About four thousand people live on her: some six hundred Guild members of every rank, three hundred hall staff and clerks, the bond-line and their households, and the rest the tradesfolk and families of the four quarters. Half of them were born on her, five generations deep by now, and carry Anzar as their second name like anyone born to a whale; the other half chose her and carry her third. Anzar is the one whale in the herd where a child born on the deck and a smith who moved from Caldwel are equally its people, because there is no house for either to belong to. The quarters carry plain Guild names because the Guild named them, and the rest of the herd names in the city's own tongue, so a visitor hears the language change at the bridge.

A settled Godshall's board fills from the street. Valreka's fills in bursts, whenever the herd draws near enough to a settlement for a season's work to come aboard at once, and then goes quiet for weeks while the city crosses empty dune. What the desk keeps between the bursts is the Standing Roll, its register of parties who have declared themselves available on short notice: names, ranks, what they will take, and which whale a rider will find them on. A party on the Roll waits nowhere; it is somewhere out on the whales living its life, and a rider will come. A crew that keeps its entry current can be raised, briefed and put on the sand inside a day.

The work comes from everywhere. The Guild Bank never notices the whales, since the enchanted ledgers synchronise across distance, so a contract posted at a Kingshall four domains off reaches this counter the same day it reaches anyone's. The Post is the harder half: within the herd the hall runs its own riders off Anzar's shoal, and beyond it pays the Outrider Corps to carry the sacks to the nearest rock of Azrar, where the Necklace's wing-post carries them on to the settled routes; letters for Valreka come to Yemmazru, the great rock, which knows where the herd will drink next. A Roll party guards a dig in Galdua Jendea one week and walks into a Duchies toll-quarrel the next, and when a posting says it will not keep, the Whalehall sends whoever is ready ahead of whoever is near.