The Tideward

The Keepers of the Deep's unlicensed trade office in the Underbridge, kept by long custom rather than any Moot charter: a low, salt-stained hall built half below street level, staffed by a patient Hessk clerk who deals on the tide's schedule rather than the clock's, and settles by weight and coin what the Long-Water Shrine's divers recover down in the same quarter.

The Tideward does not hurry, and it never apologizes for it. The Keepers of the Deep have outlasted every panic that ever washed through a coast, and the clerk seated here was chosen for the same patience. Business is done at the tide's pace: a claim is heard, weighed, and answered on the next low water, not the next convenient hour, and a petitioner who pushes for faster only teaches the clerk that this particular matter can wait longer. When the Trade-Moot offered the Keepers a licensed seat on the new Charterhouse Row, the answer that came back was the one the Moot should have expected: the Keepers hold the free-port of Sresh-Dar against every crown that has ever tried to license the salvage-rights there, and they were not about to sign a Highbridge parchment saying otherwise. So the Tideward stayed where it always was, in the Underbridge, close to the Long-Water Shrine where the Hessk divers already worked. When those divers recover something worth coin, or worth arguing over, it is the Tideward's clerk who weighs it and takes the tithe the Keepers hold by their own old custom, never by any charter. The one door out of the ordinary is at the back: a sealed hatch, opened only for a licensed diver or a guest with the clerk's own writ, that drops to a flooded stair the Hessk say runs, eventually and by a very long way, toward Sresh-Dar itself.