A Dwarblin merchant state on a peninsula in the western Middle Sea. Northwest of the Telphineas Strait, south of Erasnus, with Echea holding the mountainous tip of the peninsula beyond them. No king rules Watar. Power sits with a council of trading families, and the family booking the most cargo in a given decade speaks first on it. That is the Strugmar house now, and Drazvik Strugmar speaks for the council.
Watar was one of the five states that signed the Aldriktch charter, and it signed on home ground: the free harbor of Aldriktch sits on the Watari coast, and the Alliance council still meets there. Two centuries on, Watar is the member most openly tired of the arrangement. The charter caps what members may charge one another, and a state that holds the only deepwater passage between the halves of the Middle Sea would rather set its own toll.
The Telphineas Strait
The strait is the prize. It is the one deepwater channel joining the eastern and western Middle Sea, and whoever holds it sets the toll on half the region's trade. Watar sits on its northwest shore. Bestacia sits to the northeast, but a wall of mountains stands between the Goshwen republic and the water, so its claim runs through the Alliance courts rather than its harbors.
Watar has ships. Bestacia has lawyers. Under Strugmar the ships have begun doing the talking. Watari hulls now collect an anchorage fee from cargo riding at the strait mouth, a toll the charter does not permit and Bestacia's jurists are still arguing against. The fee is small enough that no one has gone to war over it and large enough that everyone has noticed. It is also the exact kind of unilateral toll the Alliance was founded to abolish.
The fee is not new. It is only the latest name for an old Strugmar habit. Around 3306, seventy years ago, an ancestor named Vohrek Strugmar levied a "harbor maintenance fee" on cargo putting in along the Watari coast, a capped tariff in everything but the word. The Alliance courts said as much and struck it down. Watar paid the fine and kept collecting. The courts struck it down a second time, and Watar paid again and kept collecting again, having worked out that the penalty was cheaper than the obedience. When Myorna was admitted in 3326 over Watari objection, the house filed away a fresh grievance: the Alliance had swallowed an underground kingdom of memory-thieves on Bestacia's urging, and Watar reckoned itself owed for the swallowing. Drazvik's anchorage fee is the third turn of that same screw, and the first backed by a fleet rather than a clerk.
Watar does not press the fee with one voice. The Madero family, who hold the strait-side city and whose hulls ride the narrows first, want no part of it. When Bestacia answers the fee with seized cargo and shuttered berths, the cargo and the berths are Madero's before they are anyone else's, and an open toll-war would bleed Madero long before it reached the Soleri up the coast or the Strugmar in their counting-houses. So the Madero have begun quietly funding the very jurists at Pastrova who are arguing the case against their own state. The council knows. Nothing has been said across the table.
Bestacia keeps sending us writs. We keep sending them invoices. One of us is going to run out of paper first, and it will not be Watar. — Drazvik Strugmar, to the Aldriktch council
Buying the northern fields
The anchorage fee pays for more than the fleet that collects it. East of Watar, the Uline dwarf nation of Ubrik is dying of the slick-silver plague, and the mine-wardens of its great northern fields are abandoning shafts they will likely never see worked again. Strugmar agents have stood at the refugee line for two years now, buying mineral title off fleeing wardens at whatever a frightened owner will take. The wager is cold and plain. Either the slick-silver vein runs dry or the northern mines are sealed for good, and when Clueanda next needs silver, the house holding the paper on those fields will set the price. The wardens who sell know they are being robbed. They sell anyway, because coin in the hand outruns a deed to a tunnel full of silvertongues.