Money
Three coins carry the whole of the Known World's commerce. Money taken as a whole, without regard to coins, is baeg.
| Coin | Metal | Worth | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goyl | Gold | 16 Serath = 256 Braell | Merchants, banking houses, anyone buying something that costs a year of someone else's work |
| Serath | Silver | 16 Braell | Skilled wages and ordinary business |
| Braell | Copper | — | Working people, and anything bought at a market stall |
The count runs by sixteens, as the measures do, and halves cleanly all the way down, which is why a woman at a market stall makes change in her head.
What makes a coin worth anything
Its metal. There is no single mint and no single authority behind a coin, so the only promise a coin can make is the gold, silver, or copper in it. Every city that mints strikes to its own standard, so a Forgegate Serath and a Stormharbor Serath are both a Serath and not quite the same amount of silver. The Pact does not require cities to strike alike; it requires them to strike honestly, and a city caught striking short would find its coin discounted by every money changer in the world within a season, and refused in other cities' markets and courts beyond that, which ruins a city faster than an army. Foreign coins trade at a small discount; money changers work at every gate and port, weighing, assaying, and taking a fee. Eldershore handles more foreign coin than anywhere and its counting houses run difference engines to convert four coinages against its own. Small change passes at face value because nobody weighs a Braell; a large sum of foreign coin is weighed by anyone with sense.
Where the metal comes from
Gold mostly from river gravels, panned and sluiced close to the walls; Forgegate's two rivers yield the most. Silver from shallow seams in several places, none holding enough to matter. Neither is plentiful, and coin holds its value because there is never much of it; merchants moving large sums move paper. Copper is common, and a Braell is not worth faking — half the reason the smallest coin is copper, the other half being that brass is made everywhere and a brass coin would be counterfeited by the afternoon.
The mints
Five cities mint; the Iron Coves do not. Every coin carries its city's emblem on one face, the way a household puts its sigil on the things it intends to keep.
- Shining Reach
- Under the Senate. The Senate seal and the Academy dome — the most finely engraved coins in the world, struck so that they ring on stone.
- Forgegate
- Under a guild, to the same standard as everything else it makes. Gears and guild marks.
- Stormharbor
- Under the Thing. The Kravoen; thick, heavy, and plain at the edge.
- Eldershore
- Under the elder council. Waves; the most ornate coins in the world, and an Eldershore gold coin is as often kept as spent.
- Clearhold
- Under the Registrars. Terraces, peaks, and the examination seal, every one struck to an exact weight.
Edges
Four cities mill the edges of their coins, since a milled edge shows clipping at a glance. Stormharbor does not, and could. It strikes as it did in its first centuries, and a coin taken on trust is a coin that has not been tested; Stormharbor would rather weigh it. Its coins are thick enough that clipping is hardly worth the effort, and Stormharbor coin is weighed more often than any other, and nobody in Stormharbor minds.
The trade coin
Forgegate coin travels further than any other — everything crossing the north crosses Forgegate and is paid for in its money, and the guild stands behind the purity of every piece, so nobody bothers to weigh it. Outsiders call it Noechaef, and the word has spread to mean any money that is sound. Clearhold coin is the most exact in the world and almost none of it leaves the valley; outsiders call it Cheivedd, the same coin every city strikes, struck better.
What people call it
| City | Its own word | What the world calls it |
|---|---|---|
| Forgegate | Greinsh — no distinction between money and the work that earned it | Noechaef |
| Shining Reach | Slae | Bwyjei — half admiration, half a remark about the city |
| Stormharbor | Breid — a plain word for a plain coin | Abswyn, for the weight of it |
| Eldershore | Raeksh | Unk, for a coin that is old, handsome, and kept |
| Clearhold | Staeksh, counted into exact piles | Cheivedd |
| The Iron Coves | Trashmei — clipped, shaved, worn, or of no known mint, said in complete sincerity | — |
The Iron Coves
The Coves strike nothing and spend everything. Every coin there is weighed and clipped coin circulates freely, because nobody minds what shape a coin is as long as the scale agrees with it. Coin is not the only money: stolen Aruvei works alongside it wherever coin runs short, which is often. Coin settles business with outsiders; Aruvei settles wages, tavern debts, and what one crew owes another.
The counter machine
A Kaching adds a sale, rings it, shows it, and locks the takings away. Key-levers on cams, an adding train, a flag that pops up in a glass window facing the customer, a bell, and a drawer on a spring, with a paper roll inside keeping the tally behind a lock the owner holds the only key to.
The bell is loud deliberately. Every sale is witnessed by the whole shop the moment it happens, which is the point of the machine rather than a side effect of it. A machine bought to catch a thief would say something unpleasant about the house that bought it; a machine that puts every clerk permanently beyond accusation says the opposite, and that is how it is sold. A slave who runs a counter is the person it protects most, since a tally that matches the drawer cannot be argued with.
Clearhold registers print a second tally that goes to the Registry at the quarter, and nobody there finds this remarkable. Forgegate builds them. Shining Reach buys the enormous ornamental ones and puts them in the window. Stormharbor mostly does not bother, a ledger and a man's word having served so far. Eldershore finds the thing slightly rude, since half its trade is not settled on the day. The Iron Coves has none, there being nothing in Trashmei for a key-lever to add up.
The smaller machine behind the same counter is the afa, the hand-worked pocket reckoner, which every clerk in the world owns and which costs a fraction of what a Kaching does.