Bargemen's Guild of Jalanthar

For its first twenty years, the guild was a loose alliance of families who shared ropes, maps, and burial costs. Prosperity came when they secured exclusive rights to the deepest channel near Gilantha after a disastrous shoaling season stranded three rival caravans and forced them to hire barges instead. Their great triumph was the Treaty of Eight Lanterns, a ceasefire negotiated between river towns that had been raiding one another for grain. The guild became indispensable, but indispensability bred arrogance. Fifty-two years ago came the watershed moment that still defines them, the Night of Split Oars. A secret coalition within the guild sold a winter convoy route to river reavers, hoping to blame the attack on a rival house and seize its docks. The ambush failed to destroy the convoy but killed Nera Voss's grandson and exposed the conspiracy. The guild did not collapse, but it changed forever. Since then, every captain has sworn a public oath of mutual protection while privately assuming betrayal may come from inside their own ledger. In the decades that followed, they expanded from rescue transport into full-scale freight, escort, warehousing, and intelligence trading. They learned that a bargeman who knows where the river is shallow also knows where the politics are.