The Cinder Quorum

A small crew of grave-breakers and looters who dig the ash-sealed barrow the nomads refuse to touch, hauling out whatever the drifts unseal to fence for coin — all loot, nerve, and a bad name.

The nomads walk wide of the ash-sealed barrow and won't pull a single grave-good from it, so the Quorum took the work nobody else would. They're six or seven on a good season — diggers, a ropewoman, and Sevda Ash-Tongue, who got run out of the tribes and now puts her nerve to use cracking sealed mounds. Their reasoning is simple and ugly: the dead down there own nothing, the tribes won't claim it, and a buried strongbox of old metal and temple-bronze is worth good coin to anyone who'll dig for it. They pull what the ash unseals — fittings, old coin, salvageable relics — and move it quiet through the Gaunt Ledger, who'll pay for goods with no honest provenance. It's dangerous, thieving work: the barrow itself kills more of them than the nomads ever could, and the nomads would happily finish the rest.