Athkatla

Athkatla runs on written promises, posted prices, and the threat of swift penalties. These five sites form a quiet chain that moves coin, food, and permits through the city while the Cowled Wizards and the Council of Six keep order. The Pennycharter House is the front door for honest work. Yavora Hallant hires careful staff and checks every name against the ward rolls. To travelers she is only a practical innkeeper. In truth, she worked as a factor’s scribe who saw how forged papers and hidden cargo spark chaos. She opened Pennycharter to steer new crews toward clean ledgers and known counterparties. She also keeps a private list of repeat swindlers and notes of which district clerks answer their bells at odd hours.

The Gilded Retort looks like a safe shop that obeys the Cowled edicts. Master Dern files neat reports and runs a clean bench, but the most valuable thing in his shop is the waste counter. He takes in spillings, clays, and ash from labs that do not want audits, then he sorts them and writes down the oddities that show up over the season. The Cowled liaison who checks the Retort’s books quietly reads that list. When restricted residues appear too often, raids follow. Dern never sees the warrants. He only sees steady compliance letters and a city that buys more antiseptic when the watch has to break a door.

Lanternwalk Customs stands between the city’s hunger for trade and the need to stamp out sly fraud. Head Clerk Ahar Krem favors open rules, posted tolls, and no whisper deals. He protected two inspectors when a factor’s men tried to scare them off a cart with double bottoms. Krem’s stance earned him both respect and quiet enemies. His people found narrow bottles in spice sacks, light as glass but lined to resist detection, built to move illegal distillates that can serve as arcane catalysts. The Cowled liaison asked for samples, took them to the Retort, and the bottle glass matched waste shreds Dern had logged two months prior.

The Scales of Waukeen keeps the city from tearing itself over late payments and dock delays. Disputes rise, papers are weighed, and sums are set. Behind the iron grilles sits the sealed depository where bonds and route slips rest under temple rite and civic key. A junior clerk named Serla Peth copied three bonds that looked normal but set strange routing windows. The bonds locked grain passage through the Bridge District only during two short bells that always clashed with lock maintenance. In practice, those bells forced carts to wait at Rivergate and pay for storage they did not need. The storage was run by a shell concern tied to a factor house that had just bought new lots by the silos.

Rivergate Granaries is where such paper turns into hunger or relief. When the bonds braked cart flow, bins backed up, and the sluicehouse took the blame for slow wheels. Foreman Talan Harb kept shift rings honest and posted intake chalk each bell to prove the truth. He also kept a private tally of sacks that moved off schedule under special tickets that the posted board did not show. Those tickets bore a clean stamp from Lanternwalk that Krem did not remember issuing. When he checked, the stamp die at Lanternwalk had a hairline nick that made a tiny crescent on the lower edge. The tickets that moved the off-schedule sacks showed a perfect curve with no nick. Someone used a copied stamp to shift grain into private sheds while the city squabbled about “sluice delays.”

The chain is plain when seen as a whole. A factor group used the Scales to fix passage windows that forced Rivergate into choke points. Copied Lanternwalk stamps moved grain around those chokes into private stores. A set of special bottles brought in through bad spice sacks paid for bribes and bought quiet. The Gilded Retort’s waste list and Krem’s memory of a nicked die unraveled it. Pennycharter sits at the edge of all this, because Yavora’s chalkboard jobs draw the same teamsters and caravan guards who watch sacks move. She hears when a storage shed turns over its locks too often, when a foreman gets told to change bell rings, and when a clerk starts spending coin that does not match a salary.

The Cowled Wizards care about magic control, not grain sums, but even they see the risk of unrest. A city riot invites unsanctioned castings. So a Cowled liaison arranged a legal sting using permit law. A small team would take a clean contract from Pennycharter to guard a spice offload. Lanternwalk would flag a suspect cart. The Scales would be ready to freeze bonds once the copied stamp appeared. Rivergate would chalk every barge in sight and ring the bell at the right moment. Master Dern would stand by to confirm the bottle glass. No spells would be cast by the team without papers. The Cowled would cast none in public. The Council’s syndic would sign the seizures after the chain was clear.

If it works, no one sees a duel in the streets. The copied stamp is seized, the shell storage is emptied into public bins, and the buyers of the special bottles are named in the Scales. The factor group loses coin and face. The city sees posted chalk and public sums. If it fails, the Cowled will still have the waste list and the die nick, and the watch will have seen which sheds rushed to hire extra porters. Either way, these five places, run by people who do their jobs in plain sight, will have kept the City of Coin steady without a single fireball on a street corner.