The southern coast of Pesalolo, from Divinity Passage in the east to the Tishkung foothills in the west. Gorath has held it for three centuries, taking Drasnian dwarves for the empire's labor without treaty or negotiation. The regional framing is under Pesalolo. This entry is the operation that runs along the water.
The extraction circuit
The coast is not one great port but dozens of small ones, each little more than a dock, a holding pen, and a few stone buildings against the rain. Each is run by a port-boss, a Gorathi functionary like Corin who keeps captives penned, manifests balanced, and quotas filled the way a clerk keeps a warehouse. None of them raid. Raiding is a separate trade further inland. The port-bosses receive, hold, and ship.
The ships work a standing circuit. A captain calls port to port, loading a few captives at each pen until his hold is worth the crossing, then runs for Divinity Passage and the journey north to Azantir. There are two ways east: through the Torgan Passage between Pesalolo and Agorf Island, calmer and well-charted, or the longer haul around Agorf for captains who do not trust the strait. From the highlands the result is a constant procession of vessels, predictable as tides, each carrying people who will never see the coast again.
The whole circuit runs on the Slavewatch garrison's tariffs. Captains buy docking priority and advance warning of inspections from the fortress comfort fund; the port-bosses feed the same money-channel from the land side. Vasco, who has lost two ships to the dragon Agtakkeri and spits over the rail every dawn at sea, is one of the regulars who pays and sails anyway.
The route the Moon Road steals
The same predictability that makes the circuit efficient is what the escape network exploits. Slavers run east and north toward Azantir; the Moon Road runs its people the other way, off the coast and into water the empire cannot use. The northwestern approaches belong to Agtakkeri, who sinks any Gorathi hull in the channels around Shinori and so has sealed the northern sea to the slavers without meaning to protect anyone. A freed dwarf in a fishing skiff can cross water that would kill the captain who shipped him. It is the cruelest arithmetic on the coast: the dragon that drowns cargo and crew without distinction is also the single reason a small boat can run for the islands at all.