Drazvik Strugmar heads the Strugmar house, the family that currently books more cargo through Watari ports than any other, and by the custom of the place that makes him first voice on the council of trading families that rules the state. The seat is not hereditary and not permanent. It belongs to whoever moves the most goods, and Strugmar has held it for eleven years by the simple method of underpricing everyone who has tried to take it from him.
He is a dwarblin of the usual stamp, green-skinned and bearded, shorter than the dwarves who will not claim him and broader than the goblins who will not either. What sets him apart is appetite. Watar was already the Alliance member least content with capped tariffs when he took the council, and he has spent his tenure turning that discontent into policy. The anchorage fee his hulls now collect at the mouth of the Telphineas Strait is not his invention. It is the family's oldest project, first tried seventy years back by an ancestor named Vohrek as a "harbor maintenance fee" that the Alliance courts struck down twice. What is Drazvik's is the fleet that finally makes the thing stick, and the willingness to dare the courts to do something about it.
The toll is also paying for a longer game. East of Watar the Uline nation of Ubrik is dying of the slick-silver plague, and the coin the anchorage fee brings in does not sit idle. Much of it goes east with Strugmar agents who buy mineral title off Ubrik's fleeing mine-wardens at whatever a desperate owner will take. Drazvik is wagering that whoever holds the deeds to the northern fields when the dying stops will hold the next century of Clueandan silver. It is the same instinct that set the fee, run one generation further and one country over.
His argument is that the Aldriktch charter was written by states too weak to defend themselves, and that Watar is no longer one of them. He may be right. Whether he is also willing to break the pact that made Watar rich in order to prove it is the question the other five members are watching, and the one he has not yet had to answer aloud.