Vice and Crime
What is a crime
Almost nothing a person does to themselves is. A person's own life is their own to run, and a city has no business interfering until the person is doing something to somebody else. So drink as much as you like, take what you like, lose what you like at Presluc, live however your nature requires. The moment there is a second person in it who did not agree, it is a matter for the magistrate. A drunk man is a drunk man; a drunk man who breaks somebody's arm is answering for a broken arm, and being drunk is no part of his defense and no part of the charge. What the Oathbond does is different from what the law does: a man who drinks his wages commits no crime whatever and has failed his Family aspect in front of everybody who knows him, which is heavier than a fine. The law leaves him alone. His street does not.
The Watch
Every city polices itself through whoever already holds authority there. Shining Reach has the magistrates' officers. Forgegate polices through the guilds, which handle their own members and take everything else to the council. Stormharbor has the harbormaster on the quays and the Thing for anything larger. Eldershore has the market elders and the lineage halls, and a matter between two lines is settled between two halls. Clearhold has the Registrars, whose approach to a disputed weight and a disputed death is recognizably the same approach. The Iron Coves have nothing at all.
The Court
A hearing is public, which is the whole of its method. The magistrate hears both parties and the witnesses and decides; there are advocates in Shining Reach and Clearhold and no jury anywhere. What there is instead is a room full of people who live in that city and will remember what was said, and a magistrate who has to go on living there too. A slave cannot testify and cannot bring a case — one of the abolitionists' better arguments, and never answered.
Punishment
The ladder is short, because nothing in the world's economy can afford to waste people. Restitution first, always; most matters end here, and a man who offers it before he is ordered to has repaired a good deal of his standing. Fines beyond restitution. Shame, which no one passes as a sentence and which is the consequence that actually bites. Exile from a city, for someone who cannot be lived beside — severe in a world where the ground between cities is lethal. Enslavement, for murder and for a debt beyond repaying; see Becoming a Slave. Nobody keeps prisons: a man held at public expense doing nothing is an absurdity to this world. Jails are holding places, where a man waits for his hearing or for his sentence to happen.
Drink
Every city drinks and none think much about it. A drunk man in the street is a Stil evening rather than a scandal. What is judged is what the drinking costs somebody else.
The Oelwy and what else
Oelwy is gathered wild and taken for the trip by anybody who already speaks Spraecha. Stormharbor and Eldershore keep old rituals around it at Soyl; in Shining Reach it belongs to some of the Academy's students and the younger philosophers, who take it and write about it at length; Clearhold disapproves without prohibiting, on the grounds that a person who cannot tell what they are thinking is in no position to examine anything. The apothecaries sell a good deal else — for pain, sleep, nerves, a bad chest — and some of it is habit-forming; an apothecary who sold a man his fourth bottle in a month without asking a question has failed his Station. The law does not intervene. The physician does.
Gambling
See Gambling.
The Hoesing
A Hoesing sells drink and the company of rented slaves, and says so on its sign — a different trade from a Therplae and nobody confuses the two. The slaves are the house's own or rented from a slaver at three to five Serath a week, and wear the collar and the clothing that mark them; cooks and cellarers wear none of it. A slave in a Hoesing is chosen for the work, which means chosen for a temperament that suits many partners rather than one; nobody is trained into that, and an owner who put a woman there who was not that way has made the matching error the world calls Saenydd. Her refusal holds in a Hoesing exactly as it holds anywhere — against a patron, the house, and her owner — and a house that failed to honor it would be finished, because the men who drink there would not defend it and the Hearth Keeper's Guild would arrive to say so out loud. The custom is men, almost entirely, since the stock is women; a free woman in a Hoesing is announcing that she works there, that she has come for a woman herself, or that she has come to collect her husband, and nobody objects to the second — though a good many women would rather not do their private business behind a painted sign, and that custom mostly goes elsewhere.
Highwaymen and brigands
Robbery on the roads happens and is despised everywhere, including by the people the roads run past. A highwayman is not a frontiersman and the Frontier does not claim him: the Waendra have nothing to do with him, the Roedhavens shut their gates to him, and the wild ones take what they need and are a different matter. What he is, in the world's reading, is a man who could not earn and decided that force would do instead — the confession True Mastery describes, made on a road with nobody watching. Caravans carry outriders for this among other reasons.
Organized crime
The Iron Coves have the only organized crime worth the name, organized to a degree that startles visitors: the Fences' Association, the Information Brokers' Network, the Forgers' Guild, and the Assassins' Brotherhood, each with standards as exacting as any Forgegate guild's, because their customers can go elsewhere and their failures do not end in a fine. See Blacktooth Bay#The criminal guild district. Elsewhere there is crime and very little organization; a city where everybody is watched and nobody is anonymous is poor ground for a standing criminal body. Protection rackets are almost unknown, which surprises people: a man demanding money not to burn your shop is making a threat in a city where people are armed, a shopkeeper's neighbors are his guild, and the whole street would hear by evening.
Corruption
Where a port is busy and the authority is one man, money moves. Stormharbor's harborside sees bribes taken, cargoes waved through, and pirate crews drinking openly in districts where nobody asks; the harbormaster's office is the most bribable position in the world simply because it is the most valuable, and Stormharbor takes it to the Thing when somebody goes too far. The Coves are not corrupt, because corruption requires an office to corrupt; everything there is bought, which is a different condition. The other cities have the ordinary sort, detected by people noticing. Clearhold has the least in the world, for arithmetic rather than virtue: everything is recorded and cross-checked, and a Registrar who falsified one record would have to falsify six.