The harbormaster of Halwa — heir to an Imperial office, one of the city’s real powers, and the man whose quarantine is keeping the plague out. Name not yet known.
What We Know
- Flagged in Haroun’s briefing as a significant local power alongside the clans and the merchants. (S4)
- Recently took three new apprentices — and is “known to have gone through many apprentices.” (S4, via Achmed)
The Office (GM)
- An apprenticeship-continuity office descended from the original Imperial harbormasters — not hereditary by blood. Its legitimacy rests on continuity, specialized knowledge, and the plain fact that someone must keep the harbor working.
- Authority over pilots, berths, dock operations, inspections, warehousing, harbor dues, navigation rules, repairs, maritime disputes — and, recently, quarantine. Has an informal armed enforcement capacity.
- Directs maintenance of the ancient docks and sea wall from harbor revenues; the works can be patched and kept operational but not rebuilt with current engineering skill.
- The dock crews nominally answer to him but are a practical power of their own on the waterfront.
The Quarantine (S5, GM)
- Plague has so far been kept out of Halwa by his offshore regime: health inspections before harbor access, and ships with any suspected illness refused docking outright.
- The GM rates the current holder, at Halwa’s scale, as “even more draconian than Falieri’s Cardacci regime.” When interests harmed by the measures objected, he threatened sanctions against the objectors — and made it stick.
- Why he can: specialized competence plus the city’s absolute dependence on the harbor, and no obvious current replacement for him.
Speculation
“Goes through many apprentices” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Do they quit, disappear, or graduate into something? In a smuggling port, the harbormaster’s apprentices would make an excellent intelligence network — or a supply of deniable labor. Partly answered (GM): the office itself passes by apprenticeship, so the apprentices are also the succession pool — which makes the churn stranger, not less.