The commercial heart of the city, where the Merchants Guild maintains its principal trading halls alongside hundreds of independent vendors, importers, and fences. Ashmarket earned its name centuries ago when a fire gutted the original market square and the replacement was built on the ashes before they cooled. Goods from Earth and from other Domains change hands here: bulk electronics stripped for parts, canned food by the pallet, arcane components in lead-lined containers, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, stolen art, and occasionally something no one in the market can identify being sold by someone who won't explain where they got it. The market runs on noddish coin, barter, service contracts, and debt. Shipping containers repurposed as shopfronts sit alongside stalls that have occupied the same ground for centuries. A skilled trader can acquire almost anything in Ashmarket, and an unskilled one can acquire most of it at a worse price.
The market's layout reflects its history of successive immigrant communities claiming and losing territory. The Langa Quarter, named for a Kaarn trade-word meaning "exchange," is dominated by dealers in Domain-origin materials and staffed by species who can handle goods too heavy, toxic, or temperamental for human merchants. The Saffar Rows, three connected streets of spice traders, textile merchants, and jewelers, were established by a South Asian merchant family four centuries ago and have retained their character through dozens of changes of ownership. Earth goods enter Ashmarket through the Merchants Guild but also through smaller operators running informal transfer networks, family-based systems modeled on hawaleh that move value between Nod and Earth without the Guild's infrastructure or its fees. The networks consider the Guild an extortion racket and the Guild considers the networks a nuisance.
The Bethier Portal is a stable gateway to other Domains located within the market district, owned and operated by Bethier Kuron, a Scribe turned corporate executive. Access is rented by Merchants Guild members and others, providing regular and reliable transit that bypasses the need for individual gate-marks. Its existence has made Ashmarket the primary hub for inter-Domain commerce and made Kuron one of the wealthiest individuals in the city.