Fort Triumph.
"The Old Town wall..." the soldier thinks back. "Was it supposed to keep the Docks people out of Old Town or the Old Town people out of the Docks?"
It was a bit of a joke, of course- it was originally built for the same reason as all town fortifications are built- to protect the town, or at least the core of it, from invasion. But the invasion never came, and the town grew faster than construction could adapt, and now the wall runs between two densely populated areas of Pomton.
"Kids go there a lot, especially when they're told they shouldn't." Bozh switches to a mock Old Lady voice. "Don't climb the wall, you'll fall down and break your head."
Then he tries to tackle the question.
It's a lot of wall, running all the way along Old Town's west side. No longer vital for defense, the maintenance is only mediocre. Enough to keep it from being a public safety hazard. And to keep it standing, because maybe in the future it really would be needed. In the mean time, to keep it from falling over, the city engineers make periodic assessments and repair it using mostly conscript labor.
Ergo, part of the problem. The conscript labor uses some prisoners. The prisoners often volunteer- hard labor like this takes time off the sentences. But that also means some ex prisoners return to life on the street after a few years, knowing that wall a lot more intimately than anyone else.
They fix breaks and loose stones, but frequently skip some that "don't look so bad". These are the gaps the kids use as hiding places.
"The top of the wall, the parapet, that's pretty much a young couple's place these days.
But the parapet walk was built over a strong gallery, an interior walkway running the whole length, with firing ports. The official doors are all sealed, to be opened if its ever needed for war. The fun part was finding unofficial ways in. But that changes year to year, as the crews fix things. You'll need to walk the wall and scan it with good eyes.
Look for an area where the joints in the stones look dark in a strip from the bottom to the top. The kids will chisel out some of the mortar in the joints, so they can climb up.
At the top of that, look around, what they do is push a stone in, and put a light wood cover in its place, painted to look like stone. From the ground level, you'd never know."