The Gaunt Ledger

The coast's great mercantile and smuggling syndicate — accountants with knives who move goods, contraband and grave-silver up and down the Vale and keep better records than the law does. In the Lean Years they got rich the way money always does in a famine: lending dear, buying desperate men's land cheap, and owning the debts of half the frontier.

Not thugs — accountants with knives. The Ledger moves anything that sells: grain when it's scarce, salt, smuggled cargo, the silver and salvage prised out of the old ruins. When the harvests failed they were there with loans no honest house could match and terms no desperate one could refuse, and now they hold the paper on docks, mines, and a good many 'free' men. They're charming, generous, and entirely for sale. The fat old relics fetch the highest price of all, so they'll broker those too — but to the Ledger a priceless relic isn't sacred or cursed, it's just the line item with the best margin. Power, to them, is the debt with your name on it.