Corin runs one of the dozens of small ports strung along the Slaver's Coast, the kind that is a dock, a holding pen, and a few stone buildings against the rain. He is the port-boss, which on this coast means he is the whole of Gorathi authority for a stretch of shore, and he administers it the way a careful clerk administers a warehouse. The dwarves in his holding pen are inventory. The ships that call are scheduled deliveries. Corin keeps clean manifests, balances his quotas against the season, and takes no particular pleasure or guilt in any of it.
This is what occupation looks like once it has settled in and become ordinary. Gorath took this coast three centuries ago without treaty or negotiation, and the people running it now are not conquerors but functionaries, men like Corin who inherited a going concern and keep it going. He does not raid; raiding is someone else's line. He receives, holds, and ships, and he files the paperwork that lets Tribune Volso's fortress show Azantir an orderly trade. The captains, Vasco among them, know which of Corin's berths are open by asking Slavewatch, and Corin knows which captains to expect by the same channel.
The navigation fee touches him too. Corin sits on the southern, Gorathi end of the same money that the Tamadrezan reeves gather in the north, and a share of every coin that buys a quiet pass through the mountains passes across his ledger before it reaches Helmo. He does not think of it as bribery. He thinks of it as the cost of running a port in country that does not want him there, and he is not wrong, which is the uncomfortable part.
You want to know who the villain is. I file manifests. I count heads against a quota set in Azantir by men I have never met. If I am gone tomorrow, the quota is the same and the next clerk fills it. There is no villain. There is a number, and the number wants filling. — Corin, to a visiting praetor's adjutant
He sleeps well. The men who run the worst things in the world are very often the ones who sleep best, because they have arranged their work so that no single piece of it looks like the whole. Corin is one of those men. He has spent twenty years making sure that nothing he personally does, on any given day, resembles the thing his port actually is.