Moving Goods
The world's trade moves two ways, and everything else about commerce follows from which one a merchant chooses.
Road and sea
A caravan makes about eighty Keiloe-Streid a day — near enough fifty miles — and holds it because a Dorath will do nothing else but keep going; cities lie two and a half to three thousand Keiloe-Streid apart, so a journey between any two takes four to six weeks. A ship makes two hundred and forty to three hundred and twenty on a good day, and counting calms and foul weather a passage averages nearer two hundred, which puts most crossings at ten to fifteen days. The sea is three to four times faster and always has been. So the road survives on what the sea cannot carry well: Dorath herds walk to market, timber and stone and ore cost more to load than they are worth at sea, anything from the interior has no port, and a man with two wagons can join a caravan tomorrow where hold space wants money up front. The smallest merchants are on the roads and the largest on the water.
| Route | Time |
|---|---|
| Stormharbor to Forgegate, the Brass Road | five to seven weeks |
| Forgegate to Shining Reach, the Guild Road | four to six weeks |
| Shining Reach to Clearhold, the Mountain Way | five to seven weeks, longer when a pass is closed |
| Stormharbor to Shining Reach, the Storm Passage | eight to twelve days |
| Shining Reach to Clearhold, the Sunrise Passage | seven to ten days |
| Clearhold to Eldershore, the Ancestor's Channel | four to six days |
| Shining Reach to Eldershore, the Long Reach | fourteen to twenty days, longer the safe way around |
The caravan
Four to fifteen Dorath wagons with a teamster to each team, four to six outriders on Vaelith, guards on and alongside the wagons, whatever carriages the merchants brought, and passengers who have paid to walk inside the formation. The caravan master is responsible for every life, animal, and crate from the staging yard to the far gate, and his Station answers for all of it; his authority on the road is absolute, as a captain's is at sea, and the merchants who hired him may complain and may not overrule him. Most come up through the trade over twenty years; Forgegate produces the most and the most commercially able, Stormharbor's are reckoned the hardest, Shining Reach's the best organized. A slaver house sends its own handler with its own wagon, and the slaves in it are his charge and not the master's.
The camp wakes before first light; the Dorath are fed and watered before anybody eats. The line moves at first light, outriders ahead and on the flanks, and stops before dusk while there is light to make camp, because a camp laid out in the dark has something wrong with it. Wagons are drawn into a ring with the Dorath inside, the Vennek sleep between the wagons and the dark, the watch is set, and the fire burns all night. The nights in the open — two to four between Roedhavens — are the dangerous ones, and they are why a Roedhaven can charge whatever it likes for a bed. See The Roads. Anyone who needs to cross the world and is not a fool travels with a caravan; many carry a journeyman working his passage.
The merchant ship
A merchant captain answers for ship, cargo, crew, and passengers with the same weight a caravan master carries. The crew is smaller than a warship's because clockwork rigging lets a few hands trim what would otherwise need men on every spar; aboard are a navigator with chronometer and sextant, a mate watching the hull monitor's board, and a Fraeska tender whose colony decides how long the ship can stay out. Ships sail in convoy where piracy is worst, which means the Long Reach above all; it is slower, costs money to join, and works. A captain who runs the Long Reach alone is betting his cargo against the Coves, and some do, because arriving a week earlier with Aruna is worth a great deal. Port culture is its own world — dues, declarations, stevedores, a berth — and crews from six cities drink in the same streets, which is why sailors' speech is the most mixed in the world and why news reaches a harbor first.
Who goes and who stays
A small merchant travels with his goods because he cannot afford anyone else to. Upper-middle and great houses keep factors — standing agents in each city who buy, sell, store, and settle on the house's behalf — whose letters cross the world with the caravans and are weeks old when they arrive, which is why a factor is chosen for judgment rather than obedience.
The trading year
Naethwr and Eiveil are the dead of it: roads at their worst, the northern sea closed, merchants settling accounts. In Eiveil the whaling fleet sails and the sea routes open as the storms ease. By Rwyth and Boend the Guild Road fords are cleared of Svaekoil and the first long caravans go out. Foerg is the busiest sailing month and the worst on the mountain, where the Kammra are active. Abwynd brings the harvest, and the price of Gechwyn is set for the year in a fortnight. Gaedhr is the heaviest traffic on road and water alike, with the Kammra dormant and every captain trying to finish one more passage. Endwr closes the northern sea and the passes together; the southern routes work through it, which is one reason Eldershore trades all year and everybody else does not. See The Calendar.
The Iron Coves
The Coves move what nobody else will — cargo no honest hull would take, to places no honest captain would go, without asking what is in the crates. What they take rather than carry is under Piracy; what it does to a merchant's costs is under Banking, Credit, and Insurance, because the Long Reach's danger is a price before it is anything else.