The Goldwatch is the standing mercenary trade of the Nameless Ones, the desert halflings of Keshwindi. Their forebears were Shontobi exiles, stripped of name and family in Shyona and sent into the Hills of Dolor to die. The one thing exile could not strip from them was the blade-training every Shyonan child takes before it can read. Keshwindi is poor in everything else, so the Nameless sell that. A Goldwatch contract buys halfling soldiers who fight as a discipline rather than a rage, who carry no family name into the work, and who will not, under any terms, tell a client who they used to be.
The two contracts
For generations the company's bread was the Goldwatch Compact with neighboring Gnotobi. Keshwindi supplies the swords, Gnotobi supplies the gold, and the Goldwatch guards the Orange Flake caravans down the Golden River and keeps order in a merchant city too rich to fight its own quarrels. Princess Keleila Watazari negotiated that arrangement and takes her cut of every contract, which is how Keshwindi pays for its open gates.
The second great contract is younger and stranger. The Krell frontier on Shyona's southern edge has been a slow catastrophe for three centuries, and the Shyonan council has never agreed on who should garrison it. The southern provincial houses, tired of waiting, did what Gnotobi did and hired it out. Companies of the Nameless now hold the Tazumori Line above Meadow Sound, garrisoning the realm that erased their grandparents' names. The contract's paymaster is Lord Norikane Sazagawa, the southern lord who forced it through against the council's objection. The Goldwatch took his coin, said nothing about whose realm it was holding, and bills his house by the season.
The company will hold the named ground, render its dead to no family, and speak no man's former name to any party. The houses will render payment by the season. Neither party will inquire of the other what it was before this paper. — standing terms of the Tazumori contract, read aloud at muster
The Tally
Everything about the Nameless is built to forget. A Goldwatch soldier offers no family name, claims no ancestry, and answers no question about the life before the wells. The point of the company is that the man beside you could have been anyone, and that it does not matter.
The exception is kept in a single book.
The senior company of the Goldwatch, the men the others call the Tallymen, keeps a private ledger of exactly what everyone is supposed to have left behind: each recruit's old name, old house, old crime, old face, written down and guarded. They did not build it to extort anyone. They built it because a company of strangers with erased pasts is the perfect place for a guilty man to hide, and twice the Tally has been the only thing that unraveled a killing inside the ranks when the killer was counting on no one knowing who he had been. It has closed cases no magistrate in Shyona or Keshwindi could touch. It is also a standing contradiction at the center of a people who define themselves by refusing to keep exactly this kind of record. By old custom the Tallyman who keeps the book holds no name himself, and there is no entry in the Tally for the keeper. Who the keeper was before, and who decides what the book is permitted to remember, is a question the Goldwatch does not answer and may not have settled among themselves.
The Tally was built to find a guilty man hiding among the nameless. It turns out to read the other direction just as well. A man who served in the senior company carries away a feel for the shadow-economy of shed names: which house quietly bought a verdict, which marched convoy carries a child the family has paid twice to make disappear. One such man left the company and put that knowledge to use the Goldwatch never sanctioned. Norwen, a Nameless mercenary who works the western exile route, reads the convoys the way a Tallyman reads a face, and lifts the bought-back off the road before the desert takes them, walking them north through Edari under a Korel pack-lead's protection. The Goldwatch does not own the work and does not disavow it. It is simply the Tally's logic running loose outside the book.